Thursday’s IoT session entitled “IoT Cloud and AWS: Creating the End-to-End IoT Solution for Businesses” provided a great overview of the IoT business opportunity for organizations and a concrete view of a relatable end-to-end solution built with Amazon AWS and Salesforce IoT Cloud.
Here’s a rundown of everything you need to know from the session:
2 Keys to IoT Success
Most companies are on a journey through digital transformation. This has many dimensions, but important among them is IoT. Primarily, current IoT investments are focused on connected devices. This includes connected things and device management. Companies investing big in IoT are expecting big returns over the course of the next few years. And to be successful with IoT, simple and effective customer engagement is essential to realizing those high returns.
Bridging the IoT Transformation Gap
To meet these high expectations, companies need to effectively bridge the IoT transformation gap between today’s silo’d IoT device-centered solutions and your customer’s experience. The Salesforce/Amazon IoT partnership provides a practical and scalable end-to-end platform solution to connect devices, manage data and create engaging customer experiences. The Amazon AWS part of the equation provides the edge device connectivity and data management solution whereas Salesforce IoT provides the business logic and customer engagement solution. This diagram below shows how it all fits together.
Success Story: Emerson’s Proactive Home Monitoring
Emerson’s sees an IoT opportunity around a home HVAC systems, specifically, poor HVAC installations. As background, about 50% of your home bill is heating and cooling. The other 50% is water heating, lighting, electronics, appliances, etc. Interestingly, nearly 40% of new residential HVAC systems are not installed properly. Emerson’s Proactive Home Monitoring uses the AWS/IoT Cloud combined end-to-end IoT platform to address this problem as follows. The data sources are HVAC systems, weather, device info and service history contractor info. AWS is used to connect to the data and devices, transform and route event data, and manage devices. IoT cloud focuses on the device and household context and implements the customer engagement Journeys (aka business rules and orchestrations). The 3 journeys that tie this all together are the following:
- Mobile alerts sent to installer of HVAC as part of the health check
- Proactive case creation for detected issues and smart prioritization of HVAC system alerts. For example, prioritize cases for areas with extreme weather conditions above other cases
- Customer/contractor notification if filter is clogged or part is degrading (Proactive maintenance)
The following visual shows the end-to-end view.
The Icing on the Cake: E2E solution prototypes are easy to build
The solution development tools provided for Amazon AWS IoT and Salesforce IoT Cloud make it easy and fast to build connected solutions. A solar panel monitoring demo with actual miniature solar panels, a light source and journeys related to failure remediation, including integration to Service Cloud cases, took the two AWS and IoT Cloud solution builders less than one day to build in combined effort.
