Company Biography
IOTAS (http://www.iotashome.com), named a CES 2017 Innovation Awards Honoree for its IOTAS Smart Apartment Platform, is a Portland, Oregon based company that enables property developers to easily and quickly install smart outlets, switches, thermostats, door locks, sensors, and more by easing the setup and deployment process. With this premium offering, building owners and operators can attract new tenants and premium rents, while lowering utility and management costs.
Challenge
An essential capability for the team at IOTAS was to reliably deploy over-the-air (OTA) software updates, as their platform’s extensibility and new features made remote OTA updates a necessity for field-deployed smart devices. Their top requirements for an OTA tool included the ability to rollback failed updates and manage deployments across the entire device fleet in order to lower the risk and cost of deploying updates. IOTAS initially considered building a homegrown tool, but came to the conclusion that it would be too time- consuming and burdensome to maintain, as well as not having all the features that they would require. The engineering team began a thorough search and found a few open source OTA options. The choice had to be integrated quickly into their custom board and have active community support for any issues that could arise.
Solution
IOTAS found Mender and determined that their requirements for an OTA updater were fully met. During the evaluation, IOTAS integrated Mender into their custom board very quickly -- within 2-3 days. The alternative tools did not have good documentation on integrating custom boards, as well as insufficient community support.
Benefits
The speed that IOTAS was able to get OTA updates integrated to their custom board for the IOTAS smart home platform enabled faster time to market and the ability to deploy new features to devices in the field provides a competitive edge.
“We can now improve our product after deployment to meet evolving customer needs,” said James Motley, VP of Engineering at IOTAS. “It also gives us the ability to stay on top of security updates and push new features without end-user intervention. Requiring end- user action for firmware updates is not an option for our product needs. Mender is able to provide that level of manageability and automation for OTA updates and we look forward to their continued support as we scale.”
IOTAS (http://www.iotashome.com), named a CES 2017 Innovation Awards Honoree for its IOTAS Smart Apartment Platform, is a Portland, Oregon based company that enables property developers to easily and quickly install smart outlets, switches, thermostats, door locks, sensors, and more by easing the setup and deployment process. With this premium offering, building owners and operators can attract new tenants and premium rents, while lowering utility and management costs.
Challenge
An essential capability for the team at IOTAS was to reliably deploy over-the-air (OTA) software updates, as their platform’s extensibility and new features made remote OTA updates a necessity for field-deployed smart devices. Their top requirements for an OTA tool included the ability to rollback failed updates and manage deployments across the entire device fleet in order to lower the risk and cost of deploying updates. IOTAS initially considered building a homegrown tool, but came to the conclusion that it would be too time- consuming and burdensome to maintain, as well as not having all the features that they would require. The engineering team began a thorough search and found a few open source OTA options. The choice had to be integrated quickly into their custom board and have active community support for any issues that could arise.
Solution
IOTAS found Mender and determined that their requirements for an OTA updater were fully met. During the evaluation, IOTAS integrated Mender into their custom board very quickly -- within 2-3 days. The alternative tools did not have good documentation on integrating custom boards, as well as insufficient community support.
Benefits
The speed that IOTAS was able to get OTA updates integrated to their custom board for the IOTAS smart home platform enabled faster time to market and the ability to deploy new features to devices in the field provides a competitive edge.
“We can now improve our product after deployment to meet evolving customer needs,” said James Motley, VP of Engineering at IOTAS. “It also gives us the ability to stay on top of security updates and push new features without end-user intervention. Requiring end- user action for firmware updates is not an option for our product needs. Mender is able to provide that level of manageability and automation for OTA updates and we look forward to their continued support as we scale.”