IoT platform enhancements help transform businesses

“In the seven years since founding Ayla, we’ve seen manufacturers’ questions evolve from, ‘How do we connect to the IoT?’ to, ‘Now that we’re connected, what should we do next?’,” said David Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Ayla Networks.

“These latest enhancements to the Ayla IoT platform encourage greater consumer adoption and brand affinity. By continually advancing our Ayla IoT platform and ecosystem, we enable manufacturing businesses to evolve at the speed of IoT.”

The latest enhancements to the IoT platform include features designed to spur greater consumer adoption of connected products and to reduce operational costs.

Specifically, the Ayla IoT platform enhancements include:

• Amazon Alexa integration is now available. This feature allows manufacturers to tap into consumers’ strong desire for smart home voice control. Manufacturers can implement Alexa Smart Home Skills on their connected products effortlessly through the Ayla IoT platform, without writing code or running servers on AWS.
• Ayla recently announced Ayla Insights 2.0, an upgrade to its IoT platform service that delivers actionable IoT data to help manufacturers improve all phases of the product lifecycle. Ayla Insights 2.0 business intelligence can lead to cost savings in IoT product creation as well as opportunities for new revenue streams based on warranty, support, maintenance and other value-added features and services.
• The Ayla platform update includes integrations with mnubo to provide out-of-the-box descriptive IoT insights and advanced data science,includingIoT machine learningandartificial intelligence. Ayla manufacturer customers can seamlessly integrate mnubo to perform real-time operations monitoring, predictive maintenance and product usage analytics. Manufacturers can now use mnubo’s analytics to reduce their service and maintenance costs through proactive support that avoids unnecessary truck rolls; improve the efficiency of spare parts inventory management; and gain greater visibility over their installed base of Ayla-connected products, in real time.
• Mobile data streaming service (DSS) provides the automatic and seamless updating of consumer IoT mobile apps from the Ayla cloud, without manufacturers or consumers having to do anything.
• Multi-factor authentication provides an extra security layer for IoT products, which can help consumers feel more confident in purchasing and using products such as connected door locks.
• Additional WeChat support allows the many millions of WeChat users in China and throughout Asia to use their WeChat credentials to log in, set up and operate Ayla-enabled IoT devices.

Next-Gen IoT Emphasises ROI

Although there’s no clear definition of Internet of Things generations, IoT 1.0 can be seen as encompassing issues around getting connected, while IoT 2.0 involves using IoT data to transform everything from manufacturers’ product design and manufacturing processes to pricing, sales and marketing, distribution, supply chains, product support and customer engagement.

IoT 2.0 is also where manufacturers are expected to start seeing meaningful ROI for their IoT offerings, which will derive almost entirely from the data generated by connected products.

IoT data can improve ROI through cost optimisation and savings, such as reducing bill-of-materials (BOM) costs, reducing service costs and proactive support that boosts customer loyalty. Manufacturers can also use IoT data analytics for brand development, such as bolstering consumer relationships through greater brand affinity, and using real-world data on customer usage and behavior to design products better aligned with consumer preferences.

Ayla Networks is in the Investments Pavilion at Cisco Live, the annual conference to be held June 25-29 in Las Vegas. The booth, one of the partner pavilions within the “World of Solutions” show area in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, is sponsored by Cisco Investments.

Ayla will join 19 other Cisco Investments companies at the pavilion, where executives will meet with customers, partners, business leaders and members of Cisco’s IT team. Cisco Investments, the venture-capital arm of Cisco Systems, invests in teams and technologies that improve how people work, live, play and learn.