Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Ayyeka CEO Ariel Stern (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How much of system integration work is involved to implement a solution like yours?

Ariel Stern: Before Ayyeka, the majority of the projects were system integrations. We said, “Ayyeka will eliminate the need for the complicated system integration. We provide end-to-end solutions that have both the hardware and software.” It’s almost like plug-and-play. We provide support tools. We provide a software component, which gets as complicated as a full-blown private installation in a customer premise or fully-hosted cloud-based solution. With that, we eliminate system integration. 

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you compete with?

Ariel Stern: We map the competition into three categories. You have very mature companies that started their business decades ago. They can be described as very hardware-centric or very software-centric. We need to combine two of those to create a solution. The other type of companies are younger startups.

We also see competing solutions that are offered by big industrial automation integrators that integrate several components into a solution. Strangely, you don’t see too many companies like Ayyeka that are growing the way we are growing. There are some local companies but the big market is still fairly open for growth. 

Sramana Mitra: Where does Tuya fall?

Ariel Stern: Tuya is more home automation. They are doing IoT, but they are less relevant to the utility and industrial space. IoT can be anywhere from wearables, home automation, Alexa ecosystem, all the way to smart manufacturing. Inside IoT, we are working in the utilities space where consumer-grade solutions are less popular – almost to the extent of not relevant.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your business is hardware? What percentage is software? What percentage is services?

Ariel Stern: It changes. It changes because different customers have different preferences. When you work with public budgets, you need to be very careful in understanding how the customer prefers to utilize its budget. Some customers prefer to utilize the majority of the budget as equipment procurement. Some prefer services.

We learned to develop a flexible model in which our customers can pick different commercial options. They can either procure our hardware, software, and services in different ratios. Just rough numbers, I would say that 75% of our business is around software and around 25% is the enabling hardware.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on the software layer. Where is the value addition? There’s a whole bunch of NoSQL vendors who are playing in IoT data. There are players who have machine learning models to work on top of that data. Where do you play and what is the sweet sauce of Ayyeka?

Ariel Stern: The software platform that we offer is unique in several areas. First aspect is the architecture. The ability to deploy the software both as a fully-hosted solution on one hand and in an on-premise model on the other is very unique. The second aspect is embedding cybersecurity throughout different layers of the solution. We are very connected to the hardware so we take control of the communication and interfaces. We are deeply embedded.

Also our platform was designed to support the utilities. The majority of the utilities don’t require very sophisticated tools to begin with. When you tell them about machine learning and neural networks, they are not very accepting of such modern tools.

The platform was designed to be very intuitive to start with. It’s very scalable. It was designed to fit the need of the common utility customer. We streamline different parts of the platform. We help manage the hardware through the platform. We consolidate many tools into a single user interface. Most importantly, we take great pride that our platform is not a silo. It’s interoperable with other software tools. We are very open on the platform interface side.

Sramana Mitra: When you talk about secure communication close to the hardware, are you using the cybersecurity technology from other vendors or is it your own proprietary solution?

Ariel Stern: Some of the core is proprietary. Where possible, we take off-the-shelf component to save time and effort.

Sramana Mitra: In IoT, security is a big field. I’m curious which technologies do you use in your architecture.

Ariel Stern: Most of the solutions out there are not designed to be deployed on battery-powered solutions. One of the challenges that we were facing is how to create a very secure architecture between the edge devices that are deployed all over the field and the software platform. Because our device are battery-powered, they don’t run strong CPU’s.

We needed to adapt. Embedding those very common tools into a microcontroller was a very challenging task for us. The majority of the uniqueness in the cyberspace is around the edge devices and the platform interfaces. On the embedded space, we bring in almost military-grade cybersecurity to battery-powered edge devices.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Ayyeka CEO Ariel Stern
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