Reekoh: Accelerated Enterprise IoT Adption through Agile Integration

In the IoT landscape, there are multiple vendors in each area of the solution landscape, from devices and protocols through to security, networks, cloud and applications. The lack of standards in this landscape leads to further fragmentation of services. “The reality is, fragmentation in the IoT ecosystem is getting greater, and the need for enterprise tools to manage this is growing with it,” says Dale Rankine, CEO, and Co-founder of Reekoh.

Even in a simple implementation, when users deploy devices from multiple vendors, across multiple networks, there are issues with integration as there is a variety of data packet formats, decoding and transformation requirements, and a general lack of standards. Australia-based Reekoh addresses these integration issues from an enterprise customer perspective. The company provides the tools that allow them to begin their IoT journey in a more agile nature, and then future-proof their plans and their long-term strategy.

At the core of Reekoh’s product suite are two fundamental pieces—the Platform (Engine and API) and an Open Plugin Framework. The former is an Integration Platform-as-a- Service (iPaaS) that manages device data securely from the device source through to the organization's IT landscape. As the platform is designed to be vendor agnostic, its data management layer allows enterprises to work with the right hardware vendors over the right networks and applications. The platform is also cloud-agnostic and can be deployed into various environments depending on the customer’s requirements, or pure PaaS solution using Reekoh’s scalable infrastructure in Microsoft Azure.

The Open Plugin Framework allows for the development of modular integrations that manage data and APIs across the full breadth of scenarios, including Gateways, Streaming Data, Platform Connectors, Cloud Services, Storage and more.

The framework operates in conjunction with the platform to enable the flow of this data. Reekoh offers a wide range of Plugins already in their Marketplace that customers can use to work with the platform right out of the box.

The company’s visual flow-based design tool, Pipeline Studio, enables customers to link the various Plugins and design data workflows to work with their various use cases and requirements. “There are a number of tools within Pipeline Studio that allow for data conversion, logic, event triggering and management; everything that you would expect from a data workflow design and a data management environment,” continues Rankine.

An Australian smart water metering company that delivers data services to its customers, be it water usage monitoring, leak detection or analysis, uses Reekoh for its integration needs. The company is able to deliver the same services to clients irrespective of who is manufacturing the water meter, or which network (LPWAN, NB-IoT, cellular, etc.) that the meters are connected to. If the company was to tailor its services according to the protocols the different meters used, it would be cost prohibitive to be able to take on new technologies and vendors as they became available. Reekoh provides the capability to retain the logic and service part of the equation, but gives the company a layer to define the protocols that the meters use, whether it is Sigfox, NB-IoT, CoAP, UDP or any other proprietary protocol. The metering company then just plugs those components into the existing process and business outcomes, making it repeatable and scalable.

There are a number other Platform modules such as security, device management and role-based identity, and Reekoh has a roadmap of further enhacements and modules that will keep it in a lead position within the market. Areas of focus include data quality and verification, anomaly detection, IoT billing and enhanced security models and service integrations.

From a market standpoint, Reekoh has historically had an APAC focus. However, it has begun working with partners from various EU countries and the US which it hopes to translate into a footprint for geographic expansion in the near future. Reekoh is also building upon global recognition from Gartner who named them as a 2017 Cool Vendor in IoT, and in their Market Guide for IoT Integration.