Erica Karakis, product manager for Ciqada, Mars International’s IoT
solution | Courtesy Erica Karakis
Originally posted at www.njtechweekly.com By ESTHER SURDEN
About three years ago customers began coming to Mars International, a
global contract manufacturing company based in Piscataway, with requests
to modify their products to enable Internet of Things (IoT) deployment.
After several customers asked for the same thing, the company began to
work on a solution. As they began developing custom products, Mars
International engineers decided that it wasn’t necessary to implement a
custom solution each time.
Mars International began developing a product that all customers could use
to connect their devices to the Internet. In April 2014, the company
brought that product out of the contract manufacturing domain and launched
it as an IoT product called “Ciqada.”
“No matter what your product does, it can be connected to our IoT
solution,” said Erica Karakis, product manager for Ciqada, which is now a
division of Mars International.
The solution is a value to any company that doesn’t have the resources or
engineering talent to connect their devices in house, Karakis said, as it
is a fully integrated product that takes into account hardware, software,
security, communications, and scalability, among other considerations. The
product includes hardware modules, web portals, mobile applications and a
private cloud.
NJTechWeekly.com asked Karakis if the company had run into any particular
problems while developing its solution.
She said that the development was pretty straightforward, but there was a
lot of integration that had to take place at the same time, because the
engineers were developing hardware, software and the entire backend
infrastructure all at once. “We had developed them at the same time and
had to get them working together,” she said. “Today, that’s a nonissue.”
Integration wasn’t the only challenge. The engineers also found that when
they tried to implement their solution in commercial or industrial
buildings, the IT people in those buildings, who were responsible for the
networks, didn’t want other devices on their networks. Ciqada solved the
problem by providing a separate network infrastructure of its own. In
situations when the solution is going into a large-scale building, the
company generally guides customers to create a separate network, Karakis
said.
Looking at the competitive horizon for IoT companies, Karakis agreed that
everyone — from very large companies like Intel to very small companies —
is going after the same market.
“Everyone is after this market because it is the next technology boom.
What’s interesting is that everyone is approaching it in a different way.
Many companies are developing pieces of the infrastructure, but we really
haven’t seen a lot of people who have a complete infrastructure solution
such as ours, that could allow a business to tie a device into the
Internet without going through a significant software-development process
themselves.”
And, she added, “there really hasn’t been a strong sense of standards
coming out of the standards bodies” to regulate these developments, except
in the wireless space. As long as you “take into account the security of
the network, the security of the device and make sure you are meeting
customer demands, the field is wide open right now.”
Ciqada, she noted, is going after those companies whose expertise is other
areas and who just need help with the IoT.
For example, one of Ciqada’s clients is Cigar Oasis, a company on Long
Island that sells cigars and humidifiers. Their “Smart Humidors” can be
connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi. “Using our system and an app we
provided them, Cigar Oasis’ customers can check the temperature, humidity
and averages over time of these environmental conditions. They can also
control the humidity target set point from the mobile app,” Karakis said.
For example, if they see that the humidor is too humid, they can make an
adjustment on the app, and the information will be sent back to the device
and adjusted there. The company’s customers can also receive email and
text alerts when water is low in the humidifier.
Another customer is a company that installs products in commercial
buildings. These products must be maintained and regularly refilled.
Ciqada is now connecting all of the products so that the company can
monitor usage and know exactly when the refills are needed.
“There is a huge cost savings in terms of deploying people to check on the
resources available in each of these products. Now they know exactly what
is needed, where, and when; and the data can also be used to predict
future usage,” she said.