VOLANSYS is a product engineering, Digital Transformation, and data science company acts as a ‘single stop solution enabler’ for worldwide customers including fortune 500 companies as well as growth-stage start-ups to bring ideas to life. Its major areas of concentration are Consumer Electronics, IoT & Wearables, Medical Devices, Automotive, Retail, Manufacturing, Multimedia, Security and Surveillance, Networking businesses. Mr. Bhavin Shah, Co-founder, EVP Sales and Marketing at VOLANSYS discuss the business models and solutions to drive the market of IoT in terms of generating revenues and new product lines.
Q. Many opine that IOT is just a buzzword that industry Gurus have coined to create hype? Do you agree with that line of thought or you feel that IoT is opening an entirely new market?
Today, IoT is making strategic and transformational changes with a deployment of smart devices, connected services and applications across businesses as well as personal lifestyles. In the last few years, we have seen that OEMs and IoT service providers are embracing IoT technologies to launch innovative product lines and connected services as they now have opportunities and ecosystems to rapidly realize the potential of IoT by using readily available sensor data, gateway platforms, cloud IoT platforms and data exchange services.
Leveraging IoT, the companies are creating new business models, introducing innovative product lines, personalizing experiences, increasing workforce productivity, and all at drastically reduced operational costs. In the coming years, perceived IoT benefits will continue to multiply, serving mature markets to improve competition, increase revenue streams, and transform business models.
Q. Which industry segments do you believe will be driving a larger chunk of demand? Why?
At VOLANSYS, we have clients from almost every industry investing in IoT solutions to achieve their bottom line gains. Among these, consumer electronic products are certainly driving the larger part of the IoT market. We are receiving a significant demand from OEMs to redesign their products for advanced wireless connectivity and connected applications implementation for remote monitoring, control, and automation. Smart home solution providers are rethinking their value proposition by adding voice assistance, cloud application integrations and machine learning for more intelligent IoT solutions including connected lighting, connected heating and cooling, water leak detection and preventions and energy management.
Apart from Consumes Appliances, we have multiple customers from healthcare implementing next-generation healthcare wearables, connected medicine dispensers (e.g. infusion pumps) and intelligent medical equipment for enabling remote health diagnostic, monitoring and care with self-learning ML algorithm based predictive analytics. These solutions also support FDA as well as HIPAA compliances and regulations for the huge volume of user data being collected from biosensors and medical devices.
Manufacturing industries have been leading the adoption of IoT with connected machines and workforce solutions for overall operational excellence in areas of resourcing, production, and supply chain. Some of them are now implementing more advanced Industrial IoT solutions by combining the forces of machine learning, artificial intelligence, cognitive technologies, augmented reality with the IoT technologies to maximize efficiency, predict failure, reduce downtime, enhance product quality and thus improve competitiveness and save millions of dollars for businesses.
Lastly, video-based security and surveillance solutions will also further improve its accuracy in detecting anomalies and potential threats with the matured face/object recognition algorithms, advancements in AI and ML technologies.
Q. What is your biggest challenge in acquiring customers or talent? What is your strategy for resolving the same?
With the IoT being an evolving market, getting customers on board and nurturing them for large-scale deployments require state-of-the-art expertise. Our major challenge is to have the right workforce composition with skill sets on multiple IoT components such as sensors, hardware, embedded software, networking, wireless connectivity, cloud, IoT platforms and software (web and mobile apps). VOLANSYS also brings our leadership in SaaS application development, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and voice assistance into a single integrated solution.
We strongly believe that success in IoT implementation requires the right software, end-to-end expertise, industry knowledge, and new capabilities. At VOLANSYS, our experts are constantly being challenged with their own status quo to understand real-world IoT implementation problems and solve it end-to-end with the right set of capabilities and team structures in place. We make sure that our experts learn from interactions with our customers, our partners, and communities, and from experiences with our past implementations. In doing so, we expect to keep pace with the complexity of the Internet of things and reduce the time for IoT implementation.
Q. What is the estimated revenue that you attribute to IOT-related business? What fraction of your overall business is the IOT-related business?
In all our solutions and services, we attempt to bring in best-possible IoT value proposition for our clients. If we consider our planned implementations in existing IoT projects and inquiries received from prospects, we expect that our overall IoT-related business revenue will continue to grow every quarter by at least 20-30%.
VOLANSYS is the preferred IoT system implementation partner, primarily for Product Engineering, Wired/Wireless Connectivity and Digital Networks, Cloud-based IoT Platform and Connected Mobile and Web Applications.
Q. What is your strategy to create a differentiation for your solutions and services vis-a-vis your competitors?
Our core strategy is to reduce time-to-market from concept to implementation of an IoT solution. We leverage our industry-grade IPs such as customizable gateway solutions, edge node platforms, software components, test automation frameworks along with our expertise on readily available cloud IoT platforms and third-party services APIs. We enable organizations to start with a simple proof of concepts and easily migrating into production-grade projects to be up and running in just a few weeks.
We are known for building interoperable IoT solutions that work across broad product lines and industries by using modular solution architecture, SDK based implementations, open standards, and micro services-based cloud architecture offering secure APIs to exchange data across multiple connected systems. For example, VOLANSYS Modular IoT Gateway solution offers multiple wireless connectivity options (Zigbee, Thread, BLE, Dotdot, LoRaWAN, Cellular, Wi-Fi, Sigfox, etc.) and SDK-based connectivity to any of the leading Cloud IoT Platforms such as AWS, GCP, IBM Watson, AYLA Networks, EVRYTHNG, ClearBlade, Samsung ARTIK and more.
We ensure that our services deliver the highest quality throughout their product lifecycle. As a part of it, we have also implemented robust CICD processes to manage continuous integration, automated testing, and deployment of new features in on-going large-scale IoT solutions that are in-production and having millions of users. Our end-to-end IoT test automation framework supports device virtualization, functionality testing, and performance testing to ensure quality in all IoT solution components before we deliver.
Q. Any innovative strategy being planned or implemented by your team to create demand for your solutions amongst customers or channel partners?
VOLANSYS has an established partner ecosystem covering hardware and semiconductor companies, networking solutions providers, cloud platform providers, connectivity standards alliances and other strategic partnerships with IoT system integrators. Our core strategy is to create demand for our solutions and services by bringing partner ecosystem offerings together and customizing each component quickly to realize end-to-end IoT solution for our clientele. In the coming years, we will contribute more and more towards our partner solutions and platforms to enhance their overall functionality and interoperability at the reduced time, cost and vendor lock-in.
Being a trusted alliance member and contributor of well-known IoT connectivity standards such as Zigbee, Z-wave, Thread, LoRaWAN, BLE and more, we have an early access to these specifications’ releases. It helps us to rapidly develop, test and certify wireless products. This membership benefit, along with our experience in working on projects keeps us ahead of our competitors.
At present, we are investing in enhancing our skills on edge computing platforms and cloud services used by our customers and offered by our partners such as NXP, TI, Marvell, Cavium, Samsung, AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, and many more. Throughout the year, we have advanced our Cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning skill sets to the next level. This will also help us leap ahead of our competitors.
