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C3 IoT – A Full-Stack IoT Platform for Everyone

October 2. 2016. 4 mins read
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The Internet of Things (IoT) is this notion that eventually everything around us will be connected to “the cloud” with sensors and beacons so that suddenly we’ll have more big data than we know what to do with. We can then use artificial intelligence (machine learning to be exact) and start to gain all these incredible insights from this data which will result in cost savings, happier customers, and overall just make the world a better place. Here’s a look at how the IoT market looks across a variety of different industrial applications:

iot

Notice how in the above diagram, IoT cloud platforms are central to any application of IoT across any industry. This implies that an IoT platform can be industry agnostic. If you just focus on developing a scalable platform, you can then offer it as a solution to any industry. The problem is that building a fully scalable cloud platform for IoT is much more difficult than it sounds. One company has managed to build the only full-stack IoT platform that has succeeded in scaling in production.

About C3 IoT

Founded in 2009, C3 IoT has taken in nearly $111 million to develop their “full-stack development platform for the Internet of Things” which they’ve been working on for the past 7 years. The Company’s founder, Thomas Siebel, is a complete legend who previously sold his company Siebel Systems to Oracle in 2006 for around $6 billion and then survived an elephant attack not long after. Why tiptoe through life just to arrive safely at death’s door eh?

As we said before, C3 IoT describes itself as a “full-stack development platform for the Internet of Things“. Just to get the terminology out of the way here, the term “full-stack” refers to a complete solution (front end and back end). In software development, the front end is the graphical user interface (GUI) and the back end is a big database. So in other words, C3 IoT is a one-stop-shop for businesses that need an IoT platform. More than that, C3 IoT is enabling what they call the “fourth IT wave” which utilizes all the technologies we have been getting excited about lately as seen below:

c3-iot-4th-wave

The history of IoT platforms goes something like this. All of the “IoT platform” vendors out there today are cobbling together solutions built on an open-source “full stack” software platform called Apache-Hadoop. Open-source means that the software is developed by a community of developers as opposed to being developed by any single company. Of course this means then that you have 100s of components in varying stages of completion that you need to integrate together and support for a full scale enterprise implementation. According to C3 IoT, nobody is really doing all those great things that we conceptualize when thinking about IoT. Here’s an excerpt from C3 IoT marketing materials:

The many market claims aside, a close examination suggests that there are few examples, if any, of enterprise production-scale, elastic cloud, big data, and machine learning IoT applications that have been successfully deployed in any vertical market except for energy applications addressed with the C3 IoT Platform™.

In order to understand just how incredibly capable the C3 IoT platform is, you only have to look at how it’s being used presently by their clients. Here’s a very powerful statement from C3 IoT that shows just how scalable their platform is:

For one multi-billion dollar global corporation, C3 IoT’s platform ingests 7 trillion rows of data, with 550 billion sensor and device reads, processing at 1.5 million writes per second in a petabyte-scale data cloud, running more than 2,500 analytics in near-real time to generate 8 million predictions per day, with greater than 95% accuracy.

Can you imagine the sort of infrastructure you need to have in place to accomplish that? C3 IoT says they have 20 enterprise customers using their platform now with over 70 million sensors being monitored. These implementations are saving tens of millions of dollars annually from improved fraud detection and reduced equipment failure; increasing customer engagement; and significantly lowering energy costs and greenhouse emissions (that’s the whole “making the world a better place” part). Here’s a look at a use case for their platform in the energy industry:

c3-iot-use-case-energy

While the Company started out targeting just the energy industry, since then they’ve expanded their scope. Here’s a look at all the industries that C3 IoT is targeting:

c3-iot-full-stack

Conclusion

IoT hype seems to be losing some momentum lately but while people look elsewhere for other exciting technologies, C3 IoT is going to be cranking away and analyzing trillions of data points to make companies across all industries more efficient. When you visualized a world where everything was connected and being analyzed by artificial intelligence to constantly get better over time, what you were visualizing was a platform offering like C3 IoT.

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