Brisbane-based startup Sensavation has a developed low-code IoT development platform designed to facilitate the development of custom IoT applications and dashboards.
Low-code development platforms, according to Wikipedia, enable less experienced developers to create application software through graphical user interfaces and configuration instead of traditional hand-coded programming. Wikipedia says the name was coined by Forrester in 2014, but they have been around since 2011.
Sensavation’s founder is Dean Dobson, a former senior manager at Microsoft who spent 24 years with the company. On his LinkedIn page he says: “I am now chasing my passions to apply my technical and business experiences with building new businesses that solve real world problems using IoT and AI.”
He told IoTAustralia that Sensavation’s platform, Sensahub, used drag and drop techniques to create applications and user interfaces from a portfolio of some 40 widgets that the company continues to expand.
“Our focus is to build sophisticated business applications. Our catch cry is ‘when you need more than just a dashboard’. We target the solution sets where a where a simple dashboard is not sufficient.”
He said Sensahub differed from a typical IoT software platform in two major aspects. “We’ve got a lot of configuration options in the user interface, and we have an event and scripting engine to tie everything together.”
An IoT enablement platform
Sensahub, Dobson said, belonged to the emerging category of application enablement platform.
“It’s pretty early days but we think the application enablement part of the IoT market is set to explode. We’re surprised there is not more competition, but we know it is coming.
“If you look at the market research from people like McKinsey, this is the area in IoT that’s slated for the biggest growth over the next five years.”
Dobson identified Software AG’s Cumulocity as Sensahub closed competitor in terms of functionality. “Microsoft [Azure] IoT Central also has some elements of Sensahub, but not the same degree of flexibility and sophistication.”
In 2019 Software AG’s chief product officer, Dr Stefan Sigg, told IoTAustralia that many organisations lacked the software skills, and the creativity to develop applications that leveraged the full potential of IoT.
Dobson said Sensahub had been designed to enable SIs to create customer-specific IoT applications, and the company presently had 20 partners, of whch five were actively developing applications. “We are also looking to build a suite of repeatable IoT solutions. We’ve finished one, an application platform for invasive species.
“We have that app in a pilot now with a large Queensland Council, and we’re updating that for a full release in August. We’re also looking at a solution for refrigeration monitoring with a focus on the medical market.”
He said Sensahub had been designed with the flexibility to support a range of IoT devices using different communications protocols and different message types, rather than specific devices.
“When we started the project we had expected to build quite a large portfolio of plugins for various devices. But that hasn’t been necessary because we found, at least for the customers we have now, that REST and MQTT cover the bases pretty well. However we do have a portfolio of about 15 plugins and will continue to add to that as required.”
Sensahub also comes with a script creator. “We can apply quite sophisticated logic through scripts to let us orchestrate coordination between widgets,” Dobson said.
“There is not much we can’t do from a user interface perspective. On the back end we have a visual flow designer that allows us to build a suite of business rules to both parse the incoming data, and apply business rules and functions to the data.”
Focus on rodent monitoring
Dobson said the company was on the cusp of taking steps to build its market profile, particularly in the UK with a focus on applications for rodent monitoring and control.
“We have a guy in the UK working with us to build our rodent solution. We have a couple of pest controllers based in the southeast of England who have signed up for a for a trial. We are probably about two months away from having a prototype ready for that.”
He believes the pest control market to be ripe for digital transformation. “We’ve done a lot of market research around this and we feel the business opportunity is quite big, and the industry is on the cusp of a large adoption of tech.”
