Smart, Connected Applications Maximize Agricultural Business Performance
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
OnFarm needed to move quickly to capitalize on a significant "smart agriculture" opportunity to build connected applications and dashboards that captured and monitored sensors in the field and provided actionable data back to their customers. The overall solution OnFarm determined necessary was a set of "dashboard-driven connected services utilizing an IoT backend" that would accomplish several key things: • Easily collect data from incompatible sensors via wireless networks • Provide a means to integrate, analyze, and correlate different data sets of information into easily-understood and easy-to-customize reports leading to specific actionable outcomes • Manage end-user permissions, distribute reports and business intelligence through a customizable Web interface that would include dashboards, allowing custom organization of data applicable to the business employing OnFarm's suite of services
OnFarm relied entirely on ThingWorx's extensive IoT development platform and ecosystem to quickly deliver on connected smart application capabilities. ThingWorx clearly understood how to capture, manage, and scale sensor data from multiple sources, and additionally, understood and embraced two-way communications with field sensors and remote devices, while enabling easy integration with third party APIs from the hardware vendors. On the end-user side, ThingWorx was designed from the ground up to allow companies such as OnFarm to quickly build out unique IoT applications, dashboards, and multi data-sourced mashups for its own customers. OnFarm developed and built its custom front end in Angular and JavaScript for its business intelligence dashboards, and utilizes ThingWorx' Mashup Builder to manage devices, streams, and end-user permissions that simplify usage for its customers. Utilizing ThingWorx not only allowed the company to focus its energies entirely on their agricultural domain expertise, but also gave Donny the first to market advantage critical to his business model. This, in turn, allowed his team to focus on the business of selling the OnFarm platform and establishing a partner ecosystem through its OnFarm Ready program. To get a free demo of ThingWorx 8: http://solutions.iotone.com/thingworx
