LOS ALTOS, Calif. - Aug. 14, 2018 - PRLog -- Afero, the next-generation IoT platform company, today announced a major update to the Afero Platform™ software, which provides a fully integrated environment for IoT software development, connectivity, device management, data management, analytics, security, and application enablement. New advanced capabilities are backwards compatible and include the Afero OTA Manager, support for additional connectivity modules, enhanced data models, and the Afero Console™ to monitor and visualize device deployments and usage.
"IoT projects require a simple and secure way to integrate embedded connectivity modules that manage sensors, mobile apps that enable users to interact with their connected devices, and back-end cloud software that orchestrates devices, users, data flow, and analytics," said Joe Britt, Afero CEO and co-founder. "Accelerating IoT projects demands a true platform, one that is fully integrated, fully secure, and fully interactive sensor-to-cloud. Until now, this has been a very complex process."
The Afero IoT Platform software addresses these requirements by providing the following capabilities:
With the introduction of the Afero OTA Manager, it is now possible to remotely, and securely, control the entire software stack that resides on a given device. This includes the ability to update the customer firmware on an external microcontroller unit (MCU), and install custom software, image, or sound files. The Afero OTA Manager can control a wide variety of devices including those that run lightweight operating systems or no operating system at all.
The Afero Profile Editor™ creates a secure virtual bond between a connected IoT device, the cloud, and its mobile app by automatically generating and deploying firmware, cloud, and mobile app profiles that define the device, what data it's sending, and how it can be controlled. The result is a secure and live data stream from the connected devices, which is instantly useful to analytics and machine learning (ML) apps.
The Afero Mobile SDK simplifies the creation of mobile apps that give users secure remote control over all the devices they are authorized to access. The tools also include the Afero mobile app, which speeds up prototyping, and a separate reference implementation for custom mobile app development.
The Afero Console provides a dashboard for companies to monitor and visualize device deployments and usage.
The Afero device management capabilities include secure and easy end-user onboarding. Onboarding is a significant issue in IoT projects because it is typically a complicated and unreliable task. Any device that is not connected represents wasted investment and can mean the loss of a connected customer for many years and unfavorable ratings. With the Afero Platform, users snap a QR code, type their Wi-Fi password, and the device is instantly provisioned and active.
The Afero Cloud™ is optimized for at-scale delivery of structured data streams that simplify integration with other clouds and artificial intelligence (AI) apps, including voice-activated digital assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, or Samsung Bixby.
The new release of the Afero Platform software expands the range of secure and easy-to-onboard connectivity modules. This further simplifies customer deployments and meets a broader set of customer requirements. Afero compatible BLE and Wi-Fi modules, with hardware-root-of-trust security, are available from Afero partners Murata and LG Innotek.
The Afero Developer Portal provides detailed documentation on using all the Afero tools and has been updated extensively to support the new release.
Afero has built a strong set of partnerships across the IoT technology spectrum as it leads a new approach for end-to-end IoT, with notable projects such as Kenmore and D-Link. Afero was named a 2016 Cool Vendor in the Internet of Things by Gartner, Inc.
Afero customers have experienced as much as 80% reduction in time-to-market, 99% fewer support calls, and 10x higher activation rates. In addition, Customers with multiple projects have seen dramatic reduction in time-to-market for subsequent projects because they can re-use the work done for one device in a project for another device.
About Afero Afero next-generation IoT platform accelerates time to market, provides hardened security from sensor to cloud and from factory to customers, simplified onboarding to help maximize customer connections, data ontology to streamline machine learning, all supported by elastic multi-cloud services that deliver reliability and responsiveness, and a new software engineering model that unifies embedded, mobile, and cloud development.
Afero has assembled world-class mobile, hardware, security, and cloud veterans from Google, Apple, Nest, Danger, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, and Netflix. To learn more about Afero, please visit www.afero.io.
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