Greenwave Translates Across The IoT

Global IoT software and services provider Greenwave Systems has been dedicated to empowering market-leading brands to deploy their own managed IoT services and products since 2008. Headquartered in Irvine, Calif., Greenwave Systems also has offices in Singapore, Denmark, and South Korea.

Greenwave’s bread and butter, the AXON Platform, is a scalable, modular IoT architecture for all manner of service providers.

“A device’s embedded software all the way up to the cloud supports third-party modules that can be written, applied and maintained through our platform,” said Jim Hunter, chief scientist and technology evangelist at Greenwave.

For Hunter, it’s all about translation.

“When we consider IoT, people will put a box around a smart home and call that IoT,” he said. “Or they’ll put a circle around M2M and call that commercial, or they’ll say that IoT is industrial. We flatten that. We say that the opportunity across all of that is to translate. That’s what you do when you manage relationships between people, processes and things — you translate.”

“The markets that we look at are industrial, commercial and consumers,” he continued. “All engaged with the same platform. Our customers are tier-one companies with large footprints, millions of customers — telcos, cable operators, utility and the like. When we engage a company, Verizon or the like, it’s not just about software — the conversation is about solving pain points and about ways to leverage their existing network to bring more value.”

The AXON Platform creates a common layer through which device makers across industries can communicate and integrate.

“By elevating the discussion and making it about data, you’re able to change that conversation away from the burden of the technology,” said Hunter. “With a common layer, you can really start to look at the experience.”

Within a common model, IoT makers can integrate new technologies on top of existing data layers, he said — things like voice technologies, gesture, or AR and VR integrations. “It’s no longer an issue of, ‘I have to get this VR or voice product to talk to this specific protocol.’ Now it’s about translation. We provide a true platform for others to build on top of.”

And speaking of translation, Greenwave also analyzes its clients’ incoming device data to provide actionable insight.

“Those petabytes of data can overwhelm you,” Hunter said. “You want to translate that data into actionable insight. We brought on board a predictive analytics company so we could put analytics all the way at the edge in a device’s gateway all the way through to the cloud.”

In addition to facilitating common software, integration, and insight, Greenwave works with IoT makers from start to finish — from hardware ideation through design and prototyping and all the way through software licensing and into post-production integration and development.

Hunter gave the example of Greenwave’s work on Verizon’s fourth-generation broadband router, the Quantum Gateway.

“We helped them ideate that, we did the industrial design for that, everything to make it a reality. Then we were the software on top of it,” he said.

And Greenwave got the product to market more quickly than its competitors’ previous efforts. Because Greenwave worked on both hardware and software, the Quantum Gateway went from idea to shipping in 18 months, said Hunter — while the third-generation product, whose hardware and software were designed by a number of different organizations, spent 18 months on integration testing alone.

For Hunter, the security of the IoT is the essential component for future monetization and success. In addition to his role at Greenwave, he is the cochair of the IoT Consortium committee on privacy and security.

“Bottom line,” said Hunter, “if a device is not secure, it should not have access to the internet. Because of the failures this year, IoT security has come to light. There’s a lot of folks that scramble to market with a minimally viable product, and they leave admin/admin and all kinds of things undone with regard to security.” Greenwave has their own security expert dedicated to ensuring the latest security measures are baked into their platform.

“We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg of what the Marai code and its variations are going to do,” he added. “If we don’t fix IoT security ourselves, it will get fixed for us. If we keep having failures as an industry, the government will form an IoT security and privacy oversight committee. But it’s not going to come until there’s a lot more loss. We’re controlling projectiles, we’re controlling cars — someone is going to get hurt because of a hack. As an industry, we have to get smarter on what we consider to be secure.”