BehrTech, licensee of the new MIOTY low-power wide-area (LPWA) technology, has announced a deal to integrate business and operations data for enterprises seeking to deploy sensor and analytics solutions.
BehrTech has signed with fellow Canadian firm Orange Oranges, a Vancouver-based startup, specializing in IT/OT data integration, as it seeks to establish itself as an alternative to incumbent LPWA technologies in the IoT space, notably LoRaWAN and NB-IoT.
Orange Oranges positions itself as a “one-stop-shop” for IoT and enterprise software integration. The combined offer, with BehrTech’s telegram-splitting ultra-narrowband (TS-UNB) technology, branded MIOTY, will bring “new levels of transparency” to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
The pair are targeting customers in the manufacturing, energy and utilities, logistics and transportation sectors, said BehrTech. Toronto-based BehrTech licenses MIOTY to resellers and system integrators. It has also developed a family of IoT sensor devices, under the name MYTHINGS.
Albert Behr, chief executive at BehrTech, said: “While ERP is at the heart of most businesses, these systems are traditionally limited because they only look at the data being managed inside the four walls of a company.
“The rise of IoT and wireless connectivity makes the secure and reliable gathering of mission-critical data across an entire value chain possible, in real-time, to improve business intelligence and provide new opportunities for operational efficiency and cost reduction.”
Atul Sali, co-founder of Orange Oranges, said: “With MYTHINGS, we can scale and integrate IoT into any ERP system and leverage data from new and existing sources. We can help businesses use multi-layer technologies to improve every aspect of their operations – from supply chain and logistics to human resource management.”
TS-UNB was originally developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated (IIS). MIOTY is the “first and only” technology to comply with the new TS-UNB specification from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). TS-UNB is presented by BehrTech as a low-throughput tech for “last mile” industrial communications, and goes up against the likes of LoRaWAN and NB-IoT.
In interview with Enterprise IoT Insights in October (still to be fully published), Behr said the business has been swamped since launching in the summer, leading to the company bringing forward the opening of an office in Asia Pacific, a year ahead of its original schedule. BehrTech’s head office is in Toronto; its tech headquarters are in Nuremberg, in Germany, across the way from the Fraunhofer IIS.
Behr said MIOTY / TS-UNB, as a standardised technology, will emerge triumphant as the dominant technology in the industrial IoT space because it guarantees the longevity of both customers’ solutions and investments.
He commented: “This is going to be a two-horse race. There is always an A and a B, for anything that comes to market. Very rarely do you find a monopolistic environment. For every Coke, there’s a Pepsi; for every McDonald’s, there’s a Burger King. And if you look at wireless IoT today, LoRaWAN has really been the only game in town, until now. Sigfox has fallen away; Ingenu has fallen away. NB-IoT has limitations – the telco carrier guys have their own problems, both at a technical level and with the business model.”
But he suggested, despite the continued success of LoRaWAN, and even despite the novelty of its own technology, the Coke-Pepsi analogy will split at the low and high-ends of the enterprise IoT market, with the former clearing up in “makerish environments” and the latter establishing itself as the go-to technology for the industrial space.
“If you’re looking at small environments, with 10-20 sensors, something like that, then LoRaWAN can be a completely reasonable solution. But if you’re getting into more sophisticated environments – into these production-level environments, where you’re dealing with lots of sensors, where the whole idea actually is to have lots of sensors – then you’re going to have problems [with LoRaWAN].”
