Rigado, which is focused on providing Bluetooth-based services to enterprises, announced a significant update to its Edge-as-a-Service offering in a move designed to remove complexity and reduce time to market for large-scale IoT projects.
The new Edge Connect platform runs on the Rigado-designed Cascade Gateway, which supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and mesh wireless connectivity, and is purpose-built for Enterprise IoT environments. Edge Connect also will be compatible with third-party edge compute platforms, allowing companies to leverage Rigado’s configurable edge data processing on existing and future edge infrastructure.
The company learned the hard way that it was taking integrators a long time to build the data pipeline, so it set out to develop a much easier path for them.
“I think everybody in the IoT space is looking for ways to more quickly get to the part where they can test the business value and see if they can do with the data what they hoped they could do with it,” said Kevin Tate, chief revenue officer at Rigado. The new edge tool, available now, helps them skip to that part.
Last year, Rigado came out with the cellular version of its gateway, which connects devices, especially Bluetooth, to the cloud, collects data from sensors and devices, processes it and then delivers it where it needs to go, whether that’s Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or somebody’s private cloud. The cellular version is for both the U.S. and international, and Tate said it’s been very popular, especially for pilots, which is where the majority of IoT projects seem to start.
To be able to ship a gateway with a pre-activated SIM card in it and sensors that will immediately produce data in the customer’s dashboard is exciting for its partners, he said. It’s a Cat 1 solution for the time being; it’s possible they will add NB-IoT or Cat M in the future.
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Rigado, which is headquartered in Portland, Oregon, with additional offices in Salem, Oregon, and London, started in 2010 as a product design firm around Bluetooth Low Energy, which was very new at that time. In 2015, it began to see Bluetooth making its way into the enterprise IoT, such as retail store monitoring, logistics and warehouses, hospitals and smart offices.
With that, “we saw a big need to help that data get where it needs to go,” Tate said. In the consumer space, phones basically do all of that—the phone connects to Bluetooth, runs applications and sends data to the cloud. “But buildings don’t have phones, so that’s kind of where we started—how can we build gateways that do for buildings what phones do for people,” and that evolved into its Edge-as-a-Service offering.