CRN’s 2021 IoT Innovators Awards
CRN honors 25 solution providers that are blazing new trails in the Internet of Things, with innovative solutions and services across industrial IoT, connected systems, IoT security, AI at the edge and more.
The 2021 IoT Innovators Awards
Jeff Stebbins said that demand was already picking up for the industrial IoT solutions offered by his company, New Vision, prior to the start of the pandemic. But interest in the solutions—which enable manufacturing systems to automatically connect to data from product development teams, wherever those teams might be physically located—has grown rapidly during the pandemic, said Stebbins, president and CEO of Bloomington, Minn.-based New Vision.
“Prior to that, certainly this ‘Industry 4.0’ initiative has been out there,” he said, referring to a term for the digital transformation and automation of manufacturing industries. “But since the pandemic, I’ve seen the desire to extend that to create that true digital thread—where engineering can communicate with manufacturing, and vice versa, using more of an automated, software-oriented set of capabilities. I think that’s what’s accelerated – customers want more ability to have everything connected in some manner.”
With eight years of experience focused on this space, New Vision has “continued to learn every step of the way, and we’ve evolved our processes. That is really how we differentiate,” Stebbins said.
New Vision is among the 25 IoT solution providers being honored with CRN’s 2021 IoT Innovators Awards. These solution providers were chosen for their innovative and differentiated solutions in the IoT market—spanning industrial IoT, connected systems and devices, IoT security, AI, automation and more. Take a look at this year’s IoT Innovators in the following slides.
Allied Reliability
Top Executive: Kevin Bourbonnais, CEO
Allied Reliability aims to reduce downtime, ensure safety and improve reliability of equipment with its condition-based solution called SmartCBM for industrial companies.
The Houston-based company’s SmartCBM solution makes use of condition monitoring technologies, statistical process control and specific failure-mode-driven repair recommendations to detect component defects early, prevent unplanned downtime and lower maintenance costs.
Allied Reliability’s SmartCBM solution is built using a proprietary failure mode library, which is based on an analysis of more than 3 million components across 1,500 facilities.
Altaworx
Top Executive: Rickie Richey, CEO
Altaworx offers IoT management and connectivity solutions that can help businesses program, control and monitor their connected devices as well as automatically trigger actions when critical events occur.
The Fairhope, Ala.-based solution provider, which is an AT&T partner, offers its IoT management capabilities through AT&T Control Center Managed Services, which can deploy new devices and SIMs as well as deploy data usage and rate plans for devices connected to a cellular network.
The company also provides a fleet and asset tracking solution, which combines GPS technology with a wireless LTE network to help companies manage fuel costs, adjust shipment scheduling, schedule fleet maintenance and improve customer satisfaction with web-based applications.
Alvarez Technology Group
Top Executive: Luis Alvarez, CEO
Alvarez Technology Group is expanding its IoT capabilities with AI-powered video surveillance systems that are meant to reduce the need for patrol guards for places like cannabis businesses.
The Salinas, Calif.-based solution provider is providing video surveillance solutions in partnership with Deep Sentinel, which uses a combination of AI and live guards to detect suspicious activities. Guards monitoring the video feeds can use the system’s two-way audio to disperse suspicious people.
The company also provides thermal monitoring solutions, which can be integrated with existing access control systems, to prevent the spread of illnesses.
Atos
Top Executive: Elie Girard, CEO
Atos is extending its comprehensive set of IoT capabilities with a new computer vision platform that incorporates technology from its acquisition of Ipsotek, an AI-enhanced video analytics software vendor.
The multinational IT services giant launched the Atos Computer Vision Platform over the summer, calling it the “most comprehensive video and image analytics solution on the market today.” The platform comes with a set of pretrained and customizable AI modules, and it can be managed anywhere from the cloud to the edge, including with Atos’ BullSequana servers.
The company provides several other IoT and edge computing solutions for applications ranging from smart connected vessels to intelligent supply chains.
CAI
Top Executive: Tony Salvaggio, CEO
CAI, also known as Computer Aid, is using its expertise in data analytics, systems integration and software development to help customers overcome challenges with IoT initiatives.
The Allentown, Pa.-based solution provider’s systems integration expertise means that it can tie together all the components needed for IoT projects, including back-end data repositories, web-based front-end interfaces and connected devices.
The company can then help customers gain actionable insight from connected devices by building statistical models and displaying the most important information on dashboards. This can also be aided by the company’s expertise in product design, development and business process improvement.
CBT
Top Executive: Kelly Ireland, CEO
CBT, formerly known as CB Technologies, is making a big play in the industrial IoT space with connected worker, predictive maintenance and asset integrity management solutions.
For one metals manufacturing customer, the Orange, Calif.-based company provided its connected worker solution as a service. This allowed the customer to take advantage of the solution’s remote expert and remote training capabilities, which are tied to head-mounted wearable devices, without having to pay for everything up front.
The solution provider’s other IoT solutions include video intelligence, which uses AI and machine learning to turn a live video feed into a smart sensor and alerting system.
Cognizant
Top Executive: Brian Humphries, CEO
Cognizant is expanding its portfolio of IoT offerings with acquisitions that will give the global systems integrator new capabilities in autonomous and connected vehicles as well as smart manufacturing.
The Teaneck, N.J.-based solution provider powerhouse said in June that it had completed its acquisition of ESG Mobility, an engineering company that provides an automotive software stack for connected vehicle applications as well as autonomous and electric vehicles.
The company then said in July that it had reached an agreement to acquire TQS Integration, which provides data intelligence services, global technology consulting and digital systems integration for smart manufacturing solutions.
Connection
Top Executive: Timothy McGrath, President, CEO
Connection provides several industrial IoT solutions for manufacturing customers, ranging from sensor and machine data acquisition to real-time tracking.
The Merrimack, N.H.-based solution provider’s sensor and machine data acquisition solutions cover a variety of needs for manufacturers, from data acquisition and machine management to data integration and machine learning. Its real-time tracking solution portfolio includes tracking software, passive and active RFID, Bluetooth Low Energy, GPS and networking technologies.
Connection also provides the underlying infrastructure solutions that are required to make industrial IoT a reality, from networking and power continuity to security and backup and recovery.
Consiliant Technologies
Top Executive: Dave Cerniglia, CEO
Consiliant Technologies is pursuing opportunities in IoT and edge computing with intelligent edge solutions that combine video surveillance and analytics technologies.
Core to the solution provider’s IoT offerings is its smart spaces solution, which combines sensors, video cameras, AI and cloud connectivity for a variety of purposes, from surveillance to networked temperature controls, in spaces that range from retail stores to factories.
The Irvine, Calif.-based company can also use its IoT solutions to set up systems for monitoring traffic, scanning human temperatures and detecting face masks.
GrayMatter
Top Executive: James Gillespie, CEO
GrayMatter is taking a “services-first’ approach to industrial IoT with solutions for advanced analytics, connected operations and cybersecurity.
The Warrendale, Pa.-based company extended its industrial intelligence solutions last December with the acquisition of E-Merge Systems, which gave it a “more complete solution stack from instrumentation, control, industrial networking and supervisory control, all the way up to analytics and other data solutions,” according to CEO James Gillespie.
One of the company’s newer offerings is deceptionGuard, a managed service for creating virtual decoys and sirens that mimic real devices and network traffic to deceive attackers.
Insight Enterprises
Top Executive:
Ken Lamneck, President, CEO
Insight Enterprises is providing IoT solutions for verticals ranging from health and life sciences to manufacturing and retail with its scalable Connected Platform.
The Tempe, Ariz.-based solution provider has used its Connected Platform to develop a Detection and Prevention application for detecting elevated temperatures, among other capabilities that can be useful for public health purposes, but it has also used the platform to make a Connected Food application that is designed to track food safety across the supply chain.
In addition, the company has built a practice around computer vision that includes the development of models that can analyze images for a variety of purposes.
Leverege
Top Executive: Eric Conn, CEO
Leverege is arming customers with real-time insight using a variety of solutions that take advantage of the company’s IoT platform.
The Rockville, Md.-based systems integrator provides an open and flexible platform that can be used for applications like employee tracking, fleet management, remote monitoring, inventory management, asset tracking and process automation.
The company provides services for every step in the ideation, development, integration and management of IoT applications, and it promises no vendor lock-in.
Mariner
Top Executive: Philip Morris, Co-Founder, CEO
Mariner offers manufacturers technology with the goal of monitoring and alerting companies to asset outages, providing production line visibility, improving field service and providing data analytics.
The Charlotte, N.C.-based company was named Microsoft’s Partner of the Year in the IoT category in 2020 due to leveraging Azure technologies in its offerings.
Its Spyglass line of solutions include the Visual Inspection tool that uses deep learning-powered artificial intelligence to detect, eliminate and prevent defects in production. The tool collects images off the vision system and then performs inference on the images, connecting back to the production line to instantaneously provide information on whether the piece passes or fails.
Its Spyglass Connected Factory offering provides a virtual production manager that aims to stop recurring process failures, avoid downtime and improve equipment effectiveness.
New Vision
Top Executive: Jeff Stebbins, President, CEO
With a focus on serving product manufacturers, New Vision specializes in enabling data from product development and engineering teams to be transferred into manufacturing systems in an automated fashion. In the past, this process often involved manually creating manufacturing instructions in a Word or Excel document, Stebbins said. “The ability now to do that in more of a connected fashion is where a lot of the value comes from with the industrial IoT side of things,” he said.
Bloomington, Minn.-based New Vision implements and builds its solutions mainly on top of offerings from PTC, including PTC’s ThingWorx industrial IoT platform. New Vision’s solutions and services ultimately provide customers with a “digital thread” between engineering and manufacturing, Stebbins said.
“The CAD tools generate this rich visual content, then we transform that down to a digital work instruction—using the PTC solution suite to mobilize that,” he said. “We take that upstream documentation, CAD data, etc., and then get that down into something that’s executable on the manufacturing side of things.”
NTT Ltd.
Top Executive: Abhijit Dubey, Global CEO
NTT offers the IoT Connect architecture for eSIM-capable, network-agnostic, flexible 4G-LTE and 5G in more than 150 countries, promising network access with one integration and one SIM profile for devices and machines. Its Communication Lifecycle Management platform allows for a single system of record for IoT devices, connected services, IoT provisioning and monitoring tools across vendors and carriers.
The company also offers industry-specific solutions, including using IoT to help insurance companies with customer engagement, to support devices in educational and porting environments and to improve retail store operations with dynamic pricing and refrigerator monitoring. It also offers IoT solutions to build smart cities through better transport networks, public space management and other services.
The London-based company counts tech giants including Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks among its partners.
In February, the company hired its new global CEO, Abhijit Dubey, from McKinsey & Co., where he served as a senior partner and core leader of the global tech, media and telecommunications practice.
Onica
Top Executive: Kevin Jones, CEO
Onica is a Rackspace brand with solutions that include IoT Cloud, a collection of hardware, software accelerators and analytics used to launch connected devices, as well as IoTanium, hardware meant to take customers’ proofs of concept to production without re-engineering power, compute and connectivity.
IoTanium also has a marketing component for packaging and components to build an IoT device. The offering has led to IoT device work with food chain Panera and industrial giant Toshiba.
Onica works in industries including automotive, financial services, oil and gas and retail. This year, Onica worked with Blackline, a safety technology provider, to develop high-volume streaming and data processing infrastructure on AWS to support an IoT contact tracing solution for worker movement tracking. It also worked with Plan4 to use AWS technology to improve predictions around the spread of COVID-19.
The Santa Monica, Calif.-based AWS Premier Consulting Partner also delivers analytics from connected devices, aiming to provide machine-learning powered predictive analytics and modeling, not to mention event-driven, serverless applications that scale as workloads demand it.
Optiv
Top Executive: Kevin Lynch
Optiv, a security solutions integrator that is No. 25 on the 2021 CRN Solution Provider 500, recently unveiled a security offering aimed at IoT device users in a variety of industries.
In March, Optiv unveiled an Enterprise IoT Lab to help customers with discovering devices and bringing them into vulnerability management programs, joining Optiv’s other managed security services offerings.
The Denver-based company—which counts Okta and Palo Alto Networks among its partners—aims to have its lab help customers assess devices for vulnerabilities and automate vulnerability management, among other services meant to reduce an attack footprint. Optiv’s consultants tap into the network and list unknown devices and risks.
In May, the company was announced as a Microsoft Security 20/20 award winner in the Security System Integrator of the Year category. Its Azure marketplace solutions include Azure Defender for IoT Services, Azure Access Management and Data Governance and Protection.
Patti Engineering
Top Executive: Sam Hoff, CEO
Now in its 30th year of business, Patti Engineering offers IoT-related work including designing and building automation systems, upgrading legacy systems and implementing asset tracking tools, all with the aim of helping customers increase profit and efficiency.
Its IoT offerings aim to stop manufacturing bottlenecks and automate processes through systems, applications and solutions, including using shop floor data and digital twin for production environment improvements.
The Auburn Hills, Mich.-based Siemens Solution Partner and Mitsubishi Authorized Systems Integrator provides services for aerospace, automotive, heavy machinery and other industries. In December, Patti became a founding member of the new MindSphere World chapter in North America alongside BM and Fiat Chrysler.
Perficient
Top Executive: Jeff Davis, Chairman, CEO
Perficient’s investments in IoT over the past year include the key hiring of Vishal Rajpal as area vice president of application programming interface and cloud platform solutions, leading a team with a focus on IoT solutions.
The St. Louis-based company not only offers services to connect IoT devices and systems and business strategy development as part of its offerings, it provides customers with an IoT readiness assessment and works to build IoT centers of excellence.
Perficient leverages IBM Watson IoT and Bluemix as part of its cloud-based services for device management and governance, analytics, data management and edge computing.
Sirius Computer Solutions
Top Executive: Joe Mertens, President, CEO
As hackers turn to critical infrastructure as a new attack surface, companies like Sirius Computer Solutions are boosting their IoT offerings when it comes to secure management of connected devices, industrial control systems and operational technology environments.
The San Antonio-based company combines its IoT consulting and integration services with its Smart Spaces technology with the goal of helping businesses with workplace safety, goals and innovation. Its IoT line includes analytics, sensor integration and data aggregation for supply chain, marketing automation and other processes. Its Smart Spaces line includes thermal imaging for temperature detection and contract tracing to encourage workers to return to work.
Sirius’ IoT industry specialties include patient monitoring and drug inventory management for health care, machine failure prediction for manufacturing and light and meter sensor data analysis for cities and government agencies.
Slalom
Top Executive: Brad Jackson, CEO
Slalom has used its IoT solutions to improve hotel check-ins, collect data from heavy machinery and provide other services to businesses with the goal of improving outcomes.
The company also hosts an annual hackathon to encourage IoT and other technology innovations, naming as this year’s winner a team that used low-cost IoT sensors and cloud-based data analytics to create a methane emissions monitoring tool.
The Seattle-based company has more than 300 technology platform partnerships, including ones with Microsoft and Google Cloud. The company leverages AWS’ Lookout for Metrics tool for real-time anomaly detection and predicting disruption. In May, Slalom was named Databricks’ National Consulting and System Integrator Partner of the Year. The two companies partnered to develop the Modern Culture of Data framework to speed up the return on investment from AI. Companies including Comcast and Walgreens have adopted the framework.
Slalom’s growing footprint includes a new Salt Lake City office opened in May.
TensorIoT
Top Executive: Ravikumar Raghunathan, CEO
TensorIoT provides fleet management, asset tracking, hardware prototyping and environment monitoring among its many IoT offerings. The company’s industry specialties include agriculture, hospitality, science and manufacturing companies.
The Irvine, Calif.-based Amazon Web Services Advanced Consulting Partner achieved Machine Learning Competency status in AWS’ new Applied Artificial Intelligence (Applied AI) and Machine Learning Operations (ML Ops) categories earlier this year. TensorIoT also leverages Amazon Lookout for Equipment, a predictive maintenance tool made generally available by Amazon in April.
TensorIoT also offers SafetyVisor, a solution that brings together cameras, computer vision, IoT and machine learning to monitor environments for federal and local regulator guidelines. During the pandemic, the tool developed to monitor protective gear use was repurposed to detect face masks and social distancing. Its SmartInsights tool also reduced the number of in-person machine inspections needed by businesses.
TSP
Top Executive: Michael Oh, President
Nationwide work-from-home policies and a trend in homeowners spending on property improvements continues to be a boon for TSP, which leverages smart home technology to add automation to home offices and conference rooms.
The company has also seen more audio equipment manufacturers embrace IoT technologies to improve performance and control over microphones and a greater trend of users seeking IoT technologies to better control each room of an office or home for the sake of efficiency.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based company’s recent work segmenting the guest, family and IoT networks at a lakeside property and providing the homeowner a phone application to watch every part of the property—permitting and denying access in each room—led to a Gold CE Pro Home of the Year Award at the CEDIA expo in September.
TSP counts Cisco Systems and Savant among its partners in delivering smart home solutions to New England, Florida and New York. TSP and its divisions provide remote monitoring, network monitoring and cybersecurity services to enable smart devices and protect them from attackers. The company incorporates lighting settings and automatic shade rollers as part of its smart home products portfolio.
Wachter
Top Executive: Brian Sloan, CEO
Wachter’s IoT solutions aim to take time, traffic and motion and turn them into data points, allowing companies to analyze how much time dock loading and unloading takes, patterns for patients in a health-care facility and customers in a store and video-and-sensor packages to alert to unexpected door openings, to list a few examples.
In April, the Lenexa, Kan.-based company was named a 2021 U.S. Partner of the Year by Intel for its work delivering IoT and edge technologies to companies of all sizes. Wachter also has Cisco-certified engineers and offers RFID and NFC asset tracking and a 24-hour help desk.
Among its offerings are sensors to detect when maintenance is needed and change in temperature or pressure and to send messages to customers when they enter certain parts of a store. Its TempWatch solution combines facial and temperature detection technology with security cameras to detect contagious illnesses in people entering buildings.
World Wide Technology
Top Executive: Jim Kavanaugh, Co-Founder, CEO
WWT brings analytics, automation and visualization technologies with the aim of providing customers with new insight from connected devices and sensors in industries including remote patient monitoring for health-care companies and manufacturing applications.
The St. Louis-based company counts among its partners Cisco Meraki, leveraging the vendor’s smart cameras and sensors to achieve many of WWT’s IoT solutions, as well as Dell Technologies and Intel. WWT has also formed an alliance with Pure Storage and other cloud-enabling technology providers to use private cloud toward IoT, AI and automation for financial institutions.
The company also offers carrier networking services to help businesses with technology validation at speed and deployment as 5G connectivity continues to grow and meet bandwidth demands of IoT.