Our team joined Britannia Development at CA Technologies’ CA World 2017 conference to share insights into how the nationwide real estate development company will build connected homes that leverage IoT and automation for real-time customer access to data.
Britannia Development, which built its business on real estate development and rehabilitation, plans to introduce Internet of Things (IoT) and automation capabilities powered by tools that include CA API management.
Dan Ross, general manager at Britannia Development, and Arvin Karibasic, senior consultant at Perficient, led the CA World session.
How it Began
Dan started his career as property insurance adjuster and got into repairing houses. Most of the homes needed repairs because they were vacant and had damage due to conditions brought on by being abandoned. Dan realized that smart home components and devices could not only be used for convenience but also to help mitigate loses on managed property that may be vulnerable to damage.
Arvin, who works with CA API Gateway and API management, discussed how Complete Property Automation (CPA) started with CA products. The first step with CA Technologies’ products was to use the API Gateway as a standard way to collect data from smart devices, creating connected homes. The second step was to present that data to backend systems to process.
Questions that arose during discussions were: How can we connect these devices, homes, and CPA’s networks? How do we provide enterprise level security? How can we secure our backend applications, and IoT infrastructure?
Dan’s IoT Vision
Dan became more informed at CA World 2016, and with guidance from Perficient, he saw a solution to address the challenges needed to complete his vision.
Today, the Wink hub connects the houses, 100-plus IoT devices, Britannia (or CPA) in each home. They just need to connect to the hub of each home to the Gateway. The CPA portal addressed the needs in a market, and control all hubs.
How the Vision Grew
Although it began as security and risk mitigation, Dan’s vision soon changed as he experienced a hurricane in Florida. He saw how connected homes could better react on how to respond to 50,000+ homes damaged by a hurricane. This would bring stability for enterprise clients and institutional clients.
Hence, the Complete Property Automation portal was created. It evolved from a reactionary to an enterprise solution as to where to direct relief and repair efforts. The project evolved from the Gateway and data.
Key Components
Things were moving so quickly that it became obvious that they needed to market to larger enterprises.
- Understanding how to connect homes, with the enterprise vision became clear with discussion of utilizing the API Gateway
- Integrating various backend applications to accomplish the vision was completed with the API Gateway, which provided enterprise level security for the network
- The setup needed to be agile since development was moving so fast, and requirements were rapidly changing.
- Changing project requirements added to functionality of the gateway, and change in required uses for IoT. Evolving project led to further utilization of the gateway as a key piece.
Future Plans
- Take 50 to 100 houses and start pushing the Gateway to ensure the model is performant. Grow the architecture to include new features and build an enterprise-grade model.
- Utilizing Live API Creator allowed for scalability, and increased time to market by instantly connecting to DB’s that acted as IoT data stores.
- Integrating finance with the IoT vision inside of the CPA Portal is key to introduce further expansion into the market with customers
