US based startup ioTium, which describes itself as “the first commercially deployed software-defined converged infrastructure company for the Industrial Internet of Things,” has opened an office in Australia, appointing Lee Burrows as APAC director.
Prior to joining ioTium, Gold Coast based Burrows spent 16 years with Siemens Electric, most recently as sales director for the Pacific. The company said it planned to add sales and engineering talent in the coming monthsi, and ioTium founder and CEO Ron Victor told IoTAustraliathat the company would soon open an office in Sydney.
“We have customers in Australia in the building automation space and we are adding customers in the energy and oil and gas space,” he said. “We go direct to customers and we have partnerships with global systems integrators we are working with in Australia today.”
In November 2018 the company became a gold partner of Siemens MindSphere partner program, and Victor told IoTAustraliathat another similar partnership was being negotiated and would be announced in coming months.
SDN as a service for IIoT
ioTium claims to use software defined network technology to securely connect any legacy device securely to public or private cloud over any communications infrastructure, with zero or minimal involvement from IT personnel. It does not sell hardware of software but provides this functionality as a service.
Victor told IoTAustralia the company was four years old with 55 employees and had been shipping product for seven quarters to about 30 customers.
“We are shipping thousands of units,” Victor said. “Our customers are typically the Who’s Who in the building automation space, oil and gas, power utilities and manufacturing.
“Our team’s DNA is a bunch of people out of Cisco. Juniper Qualcomm, Wind River and SafeNet. We understand routing, switching, security, embedded systems and cloud really well.
Industrial IoT with minimal IT
“We came together to provide a plug and play infrastructure such that any legacy brownfield asset in the world can be connected to an application in the cloud with minimal IT intervention.”
He said the company had raised $US22m in funding to date and its investors include former Cisco CEO John Chambers
In September 2018 ioTium raised $13.6m in a series B round when Honeywell Ventures, John Chambers’ JC2 Ventures and Hanna Ventures joined existing investors GE Ventures and Juniper Ventures.
There are three key components to the ioTium system:
– a Linux box, the iNode running the ioTium software that sits in a remote location, takes data from connected devices, running edge applications and communicating to public or private cloud;
– software running in the cloud to support communication with the remote units;
– Management software, the IoTium Orchestrator, to configure, monitor and control the remote devices.
Victor said these field units were entirely post-provisioned to enable them to support a wide range of device protocols and wide area communications.
“It is a software defined network plus firewall and security, plus edge compute all combined into a single piece of software running on commodity hardware,” he said. “When it reaches the [customers’ site] it has nothing on it but our operating system, a certificate and a key.
“With one click I can choose a protocol software adaptor from vendor X, encryption from vendor Y and push it to the edge and then to all the boxes. And with one click I can change it on all the boxes.”
He said the company was focussing its sales and marketing investments on four verticals; building automation, manufacturing, oil and gas and power and utilities, adding: “We have already seen transport show up on our radar.”
