Introducing the Connected Product Foundation

Brandon Cannaday
Brandon Cannaday | 3 minute read

One of the largest business opportunities in IoT is for organizations to sell turnkey connected products and services. This is especially true for OEMs with existing product lines. Transforming existing equipment into enterprise connected products creates new recurring revenue streams and competitive differentiation.

Building a customer-facing connected product, however, is not easy. It requires multi-tenancy, user management, device management, a branded user interface, and the customizability to tailor the solution to your specific use case. Losant’s Connected Product Foundation (CPF) now delivers all of this capability as a pre-built template.

Starting your IoT application from the CPF greatly reduces development costs, reduces time-to-market, and gives your product a secure and scalable foundation for future growth.

To learn more about the Connected Product Foundation, please check out the replay of the CPF Deeper Dive Webinar.

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Turnkey IoT Application

The Connected Product Foundation is a complete, off-the-shelf, application. With first-class support for white labeling, you can have a fully-branded application, ready to ship, in just a few minutes - all without writing a single line of code.

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This is especially important for internal POCs. You can instantly invite internal or external stakeholders into your application so that they can quickly understand the solution and its value to your organization.

Standardized Architecture and Open Implementation

Losant Experiences is an extremely flexible environment in which customer-facing applications are built and hosted. This flexibility offers a lot of power, but can be challenging for new users when it comes to architecting their solution.

Over the years, we’ve identified the best web frameworks, the best resource organization, and many other best practices that lead to a well-architected Losant application. The Connected Product Foundation is a culmination of these learnings.

The CPF contains dozens of pre-built experience resources all following our best practices. As you begin expanding the CPF with new functionality, your developers are presented an opinionated framework in which to work. This architectural guidance greatly increases developer efficiency while ensuring your application is built on a secure and scalable foundation.

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One of the biggest differentiators for the CPF is that the implementation is completely open and available for you to modify. When you start an application from the CPF template, every resource that makes up the CPF is imported into your application. This means you can modify and expand any part of the CPF to meet your specific requirements.

Alternative solutions like Azure IoT Central, Software AG Cockpit, or AWS Sitewise, do not allow you to change the underlying implementation. The moment you need to customize your solution beyond what they provide, you have to abandon their portal and build from scratch.

Library of Reusable Components

The CPF is built using many self-contained and modular components. Things like the Devices Table and the Events Table can easily be moved around or reused in other parts of the application. The CPF has been designed with an architecture where reusable components are a core concept.

Losant’s Template Library is already home to dozens of reusable components, but they were not originally designed with the CPF’s architecture in mind. Over time, Losant will port these existing templates over to the CPF architecture. Losant will also continue to ship new templates, but every template from now on will be designed for the CPF.

Standardizing our templates on the CPF gives us more capability when it comes to delivering plug-and-play functionality for your applications. This approach reduces or completely eliminates any integration work that exists today when using templates. What this means for you is that new, turnkey, functionality will be continually delivered by Losant that you can immediately incorporate into your CPF-based connected products.

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Get Started With the Connected Product Foundation

The CPF is an Application Template and is intended to be the starting point for new Losant applications. To get started with the CPF, create a new application and choose the Connected Product Foundation template.

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The CPF template provides example devices, dashboards, users, groups, and a simulation workflow to generate device data. This allows you to immediately begin exploring the CPF features without requiring any physical devices.

For more details, please check out the CPF User Guide. To learn more about how Losant and the CPF can help accelerate IoT in your organization, please contact us to talk to a representative.