10 Red-Hot Analytics Tools For Solution Providers Investing In IoT

Data Analytics Key For IoT

While IoT may be a hot market from the consumer device perspective – with products like Google's smart thermostat Nest – for solution providers dealing with operational technology and enterprise clients, it goes beyond just the product.

Data analytics tools are a key part of IoT platforms for companies collecting and analyzing data from sensors on factory equipment, smart meters and delivery trucks.

These tools help Internet of Things solutions reach beyond merely connecting devices so that end users can monitor that data for flaws in their systems and make real-time decisions and about where they can become more efficient.

Following are 10 data analytics tools for solution providers looking to create and implement cutting-edge IoT solutions.

Azure Stream Analytics

Microsoft's Azure Stream Analytics – part of the company's Azure IoT Suite – is a fully managed service that enables customers to do real-time stream processing of data in-motion in ’SQL-like language.’

A few months back, Microsoft also said it has integrated Azure Stream Analytics with Power BI, enabling customers to output data directly from their streaming jobs to real-time dashboards with built-in Power BI so there is a visual element to how they monitor data.

What's Cool About It: Stream Analytics provides a number of input connectors, such as Azure Event Hubs and Azure IoT Hubs, which allow users to easily ingest data at scale,so they can aggregate, filter and group the streaming data on temporal windows.

Vitria

Vitria's IoT analytics platform brings together key capabilities for targeted vertical industries, including manufacturing, energy/utilities and retail.

The platform includes streaming data ingestion to leverage IoT protocols, as well as a Unified Analytics Engine to provide faster analytics in real time by unifying streaming, historical and predictive analytics. These features are brought together by a Command Center, providing a set of self-service tools and dashboards for end users.

What's Cool About It: Vitria includes a feature that accesses users' historical data stored in various warehouses and databases. These existing databases then become unified into the broader platform for comprehensive analytics processing over time.

Dell Statistica

Dell has approached IoT analytics from the edge with its Statistica tool, with features like edge scoring for IoT analytics, collective intelligence and native distributed analytics architecture (NDAA). The latest release of Statistica, version 13.1, came out recently with new capabilities Dell said are designed to empower data scientists, enable organizations to better address growing IoT analytics requirements, and leverage heterogeneous data environments.

What's Cool About It: Statistica's collective intelligence feature is designed to help businesses embrace the app marketplace for models. Users can monetize models or import models written by others – so the platform has good connectivity to increase its capability based on what the user requires.

IBM Watson IoT Platform Analytics

IBM bundles its Internet of Things analytics tool into part of its larger strategy in developing artificial intelligence solutions.

The Watson analytics services enable users to leverage cognitive analytics with structured – and unstructured – data to understand situations, look at options and learn as conditions change. Users gain access to Watson natural language processing, Watson text analytics, Watson video and image analytics, and Watson machine learning tools.

What's Cool About It: IBM recently partnered with AT&T so developers can now use IBM's Watson Internet of Things Platform and Bluemix services together with AT&T IoT Platforms to gain deeper insight from data collected from connected devices.

Cisco Connected Streaming Analytics

Cisco leverages its wide installation base of networking customers with its Connected Streaming Analytics platform. This platform streams live data from multiple sources for real-time insight with big data views. The CSA platform features distributed and tiered options to deliver horizontal scale and localized data processing, as well as high-performance, real-time analytics with low latency.

What's Cool About It: Over the past few years, Cisco has made several key acquisitions – including Parstream, Composite Software and Truviso – to bolster its analytics tools, enabling the platform to collect data as close to the edge as possible and efficiently pass it back to the center for analytics.

Oracle Edge Analytics And Stream Explorer

Oracle's analytics platform is comprised of two pieces, the Stream Explorer, which collects data in the cloud or enterprise, and Edge Analytics, which filters and aggregates data on embedded devices. These two tools enable out-of-the-box analytics that detects patterns in streams for vertical markets in particular.

What's Cool About It: Oracle's platform features a user-friendly tool for exploring streams in real time and creating streaming apps, enabling business users to build their own analytics solutions.

SAP HANA's Smart Data Streaming

SAP's current cloud-based analytics includes pre-integrated and open IoT capabilities based on the HANA cloud platform, and provides smart data streaming, remote data synchronization, IoT services for device message management and IoT application services to cloud-based environments. SAP also offers Streaming Lite, a small-footprint version of its data analytics engine that allows customers to deploy on devices closer to the edge.

What's Cool About It: SAP's partnership with Dell brings a series of edge models to the enterprise by combining Dell's Edge Gateway 5000 with SAP's IoT platform. This allows businesses to address operational challenges such as machine productivity, predictive maintenance and business continuity.

Intel Analytics Toolkit

Intel's IoT platform provides an ’end-to-end reference model and family of products’ that can be combined with other third-party products to create analytics solutions. IoT Analytics includes resources for the collection and analysis of sensor data, which the Intel IoT Developer Kit provides, according to Intel.

What's Cool About It: Intel's beta cloud-based analytics system for IoT includes resources for the collection and analysis of sensor data – so customers using this service can jump-start data acquisition and analysis without having to invest in large-scale storage and processing capacity.

PTC ThingWorx Analytics

PTC's ThingWorx Analytics, part of the company's larger IoT platform, enables developers to detect real-time patterns and anomalies, as well as predictive analytics, in the solutions they build. ThingWorx also provides web and mobile application enablement and runtime capabilities, providing rapid development of role-based user experiences.

What's Cool About It: PTC recently announced an augmented reality feature as part of its IoT analytics platform, called Vuforia Studio Enterprise – enabling customers to focus less on data communication and more on visual communication behind IoT.

Tellient IoT Analytics

Tellient's IoT cloud analytics product focuses on smart home systems and wearable technologies, enabling an unlimited number of customers to access IoT analytics information from any device, at scheduled times – so executives can receive reports on the data emailed to them every month. The tool's key applications including marketing, finance and supply chain management. Tellient also offers flat pricing regardless of the number of dashboard users for its IoT analytics platform.

What's Cool About It: Tellient prides itself on the visualization aspects of its IoT analytics tool, which give customers a ’beautiful’ configurable representation of data trends and predictions on simple, easily sharable graphs, maps and line charts.