Retrofit connectivity is making commercial and industrial equipment smart by connecting it to the cloud. Most equipment made over the past decade feature built-in sensors, electronic controls, and ports for service technicians to access operational data. Such diagnostic ports can be used to retrofit equipment with connectivity adapters for the real-time collection and transmission of valuable diagnostic data to the cloud.
Leveraging retrofit connectivity creates many opportunities to drive efficiencies and deliver new revenue opportunities across a wide range of industries and commercial and industrial applications:
- Lower TCO by exposing machine and factory floor data for process optimization
- Reduce equipment costs through predictive maintenance and fewer service calls
- Maximize ROI by delivering new services
Developing and maintaining an IoT connectivity solution is challenging. It requires dedicated resources and considerable expertise in security, hardware design, communications technologies, device and cloud applications and integrations, cloud infrastructure, and ongoing security and platform maintenance.
Additionally, a retrofit connectivity solution poses some specific challenges:
- Achieving fast time-to-market and lowering the cost to deploy and maintain the solution
- Ensuring end-to-end security, including long-term security maintenance
- Integrating divergent legacy protocols, interfaces, data formats, and applications
The Electric Imp Platform has everything your organization needs to quickly and seamlessly implement retrofit connectivity solutions that can scale from proof-of-concepts to large-scale commercial deployments.
The Electric Imp Platform is well suited to retrofit applications:
- Provides end-to-end security from the equipment to the cloud (UL 2900-2-2 Cybersecurity), including continuous security maintenance
- Has pre-built integrations and protocol support both for devices and cloud services, and supports custom integrations to cover a wide range of customer needs
- Is fully integrated to minimize complexity, accelerate time-to-market, and deliver low TCO over the lifetime of the solution
Complementing its time-to-market advantages, the benefits of the Electric Imp Platform continue after your deployment as we manage the connectivity, security, and updates throughout the lifecycle of your deployment.
Cybex
Cybex, a leader in premium exercise equipment for fitness facilities, came to Electric Imp for help in developing Cybex Care, its web-based asset management system.
The Electric Imp Platform enables operational data collected from the treadmill sensors to be securely delivered to the Cybex cloud platform via a proprietary connectivity adapter easily installed in each treadmill’s service port.
This has given gym owners real-time insights into the status of each treadmill that has allowed them to reduce breakdowns by 70%, lower their overall maintenance costs by 30%, and maximize the service lives of their treadmills by swapping high-mileage models with low-mileage units to reduce wear-and-tear.
Read the full case study here.
Cybex successfully brought Cybex Care to market quickly and cost effectively, leaving the complexity of secure connectivity and scalable device management to Electric Imp.