EVERY BUSINESS WANTS their work to be more efficient without having to spend extra.
Machinery and devices have certainly helped the matter in the past few years with technology speeding up certain processes, but there’s another area that’s going to really affect how the likes of manufacturing and services are carried out.
Depending on who you talk to, the Internet of Things (IoT) will result in $1.7 trillion in value added to the global economy in 2019. While that’s a large figure, it’s still in the early stages but it hasn’t stopped big-name companies like Google, Apple and Samsung from throwing their hat into the ring.
Yet among all the talk, there’s a startup based in Dublin which plans to become the lynchpin for any company that wants to take advantage of IoT and want their entry to be as smooth as possible.
Cesanta was founded in 2014 by two ex-Google employees, Anatoly Lebedev and Sergey Lyubka, and is currently made up of former Google, Hubspot and Twitter employees, companies that are already set up in Dublin.
Essentially offering a way for companies to connect their devices to the internet and make them smarter, it works with companies to help cater the system to their needs and bring them up to speed.
Its first product, a high-performance web server named Mongoose, has more than one million downloads and has used by the likes of Samsung and Intel while its IoT service Smart.js, connects up normal devices to the internet.
There are two main reasons why Lebedev and Lyubka feel their offering is better than the larger companies.
The first is they’ve worked in the area for many years and have the experience – while the startup was founded a year ago, they’ve been working on the technology for years and their engineers are also former senior Google employees – while the other is for those companies who are interested in making their products smarter, they don’t have to invest huge amounts into research and development before they can get started.
By taking the work and housekeeping out of developing a platform, it gives companies more freedom when connecting up their own devices. And by offering such a service in Ireland, it means most businesses here won’t have to look far if they want to make the leap.
“Not many people understand that we do have the ability to build internally and that’s why we’re here,” explains Lebedev. “What we’re enabling is like any of those other services, a business can come to us and say ‘we want that connected’ and we’ll say ‘here you go’. We’ll have it up and running in weeks.”
The message we’re sending out is if you’re a business and you have a device which can be connected, don’t go the long route [of research and development] because you’re not only creating, you’re putting destiny on yourself to maintain it for the rest of your life.
While the bigger companies try to offer services that ultimately tie back into their own products, Cesanta licenses the software and works with any of the companies that want to use their service. It’s open-source and the platform is flexible enough to cater for most, if not all, devices.
Companies invest significant amounts of time and money in developing such platforms and most of the time, they’re internal and only work for a select few products. that’s the area Cesanta is trying to avoid and by offering a service that can fit a company, it puts itself as the lynchpin that connects devices with the internet.
“In pretty much any application, there are these basic things, basic pieces of functionality that need to be implemented [like] security, reliability, scalability,” says Lyubka.
What we do is we provide that so we provide that underlying infrastructure, housekeeping stuff, and also a very important bit that need to implement is remote management so once you deployed [your devices], there’s no luxury to go and maintain them, it should be a remote management piece… the way anti-virus software manages.
The other major area that they’re confident of is security and scalability. While that’s a concern for many, Lebedev says it’s where the company’s strengths lie as “we know how to make the system work and protect it with security.”
For the average person, they’re not going to truly grasp the benefits until they’re using services that take full advantage of it.
For now, that’s not a concern since the focus is on businesses. Lebedev says they’re “actively looking for those early adopters” as they prepare to launch smart.js soon.
“What we’re basically saying is we’re providing an open-source and agnostic solution for everyone so what’s important is the customer,” says Lebedev. “The other guys say you have to use that, that and that… we’re actually concerned about getting devices connected and how we solve that in a scalable way.”
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