Kontakt.io, a leading BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) infrastructure and solution provider, announced a partnership with†Mist Systems, a pioneer in self-learning networks powered by Artificial Intelligence, to simplify the design, deployment, and management of IoT solutions. By combining Kontakt.io’s IoT platform (launching at Mobile World Congress, 2019) with Mist’s AI-driven Wireless LAN (WLAN), joint customers have a seamless solution for accurate IoT device location that leverages standards-based Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. This maximizes the ROI of strategic digitization projects while ensuring widespread applicability across various industries, including industrial manufacturing, healthcare, and enterprises.
Deploying an IoT solution is a complex and resource-consuming project, requiring the orchestration of tags, gateways or access points, and management platforms that receive data, locate devices, store data, and provide analytics. These deployments often involve custom development, integration, manual calibration and testing, which significantly delays the rollout and increases the cost of IoT projects. What is more, the traditional way to scale deployment or increase tracking accuracy is to add more gateways or access points, which brings further cost and complexity.
The joint Mist and Kontakt.io solution addresses these challenges in numerous ways. Kontakt.io’s next-generation IoT Platform combines complex RTLS, IoT, and Workflow Management technologies to deliver user-centric, data-driven end-to-end solutions. Using accurate location positioning and sensor data, the platform analyzes and turns data into actionable reports and workflows that facilitate decision-making and drive business outcomes.
The†Mist Learning WLAN†is a single, converged cloud-based microservices platform for Wi-Fi and BLE indoor location services, that eliminates the need for expensive overlay platforms and battery powered gateways for asset location and user engagement. Mist’s patented virtual BLE (vBLE) technology leverages unsupervised machine learning along with a 16-element vBLE antenna array to deliver high accuracy location for any BLE device with very low latency, such as Kontakt.io tags or IoT devices with embedded BLE capabilities. Mist provides location and telemetry information, such as dwell times and visits, for assets and IoT devices via standards-based protocols.
The partnership brings integration of both solutions, enabling seamless location and sensor data flow from BLE tags to Mist gateways, to the Kontakt.io IoT Platform. This enables Kontakt.io’s customers to leverage Mist’s flagship BLE coverage and low latency to significantly reduce the number of required access points while achieving outstanding accuracy. Additionally, Mist’s customers can use their existing wireless infrastructures to connect to the Kontakt.io’s IoT platform and rapidly roll out an IoT solution.
“With the advancing consumerization of enterprise technologies, companies expect end-to-end solutions that are easy to deploy, use, and scale,” says Philipp von Gilsa, CEO at Kontakt.io. “Bringing the missing convergence of various proprietary infrastructures is one of the steps Kontakt.io is taking to simplify enterprise IoT. We are excited to have Mist as our partner on that mission.”
“Mist is committed to working with market leaders like Kontakt.io to facilitate the mass market adoption of indoor location services using standards-based BLE technology,” said Bob Friday, CTO and co-founder of Mist. “Through alliances like this one, Mist makes indoor location services easy to adopt and scale and is paving the way for mass market adoption across a wide range of industries.”
Availability
The technical integration of Kontakt.io and Mist Systems is currently in progress. To further expedite time-to-market, both companies are preparing joint out-of-the-box product bundles.
