The oldest things – brownfield industrial and commercial machines and infrastructure that may have been in the field for years – are the hottest “news” when it comes to IoT.
So it’s not surprising that SmartLink™, a new product from Pitney Bowes, just won the Best Business Transformation Solution Award at the 2016 IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona. SmartLink leverages the Electric Imp secure connectivity and application enablement platform on a private cloud to become a hot retrofit for Pitney Bowes’ postage meters.
The journey from good idea to innovative product that customers love is core to Pitney Bowes transformation.
In a recent Forbes article, Roger Pilc, Pitney Bowes Chief Innovation Officer, describes how the $3.5 billion technology services company has focused on innovation to reinvent certain aspects of a 100 year old business.
“For us, innovation holistically is a marriage of technology, invention, business insight, and, ultimately, to create value for clients,” said Pilc. “They are all wrestling with the same thing, which is how to succeed in an increasingly complex digital and physical world, an increasingly global world, and they are wrestling with multiple technologies.”
SmartLink makes it easy to connect customers’ mailstation2™ digital postage meters to the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud.
“With Electric Imp, we were able to provide a more robust connectivity solution that was easy to install and lower cost,” said Rick Ryan, security and IoT fellow for Pitney Bowes Strategic Technology and Innovation Center.
The customer simply connects the SmartLink device via USB cable to the postage machines. The SmartLink, with an impDevice™ inside, connects securely to the internet via an ethernet cable or WiFi and our impCloud™. At install, the devices are securely commissioned and activated with a web app using our patented BlinkUp™. Once connected to the internet, the meters can sync with the Pitney Bowes Data Center any time of day or night to download postal rate updates, refill postage, update software, order ink,and tap other Connected Commerce services in the future.
Ryan adds that connecting to the Internet of Things (IoT) isn’t just about creating highly-trusted downloads of more postage and software updates, it paves the way for new commerce services based on ongoing communication with the meters.
We’re very pleased to be part of the SmartLink solution, being recognized with the award and helping Pitney Bowes make their vision for business transformation possible.
Oliver Hutaff
CFO/COO
Electric Imp