 Webee co-founder Cecilia Flores is continuing to share her expert insights on IoT and tech industry panels. In March she spoke with Protocol about low-code and no-code developer tools. This month, she appeared on Constellation Research’s DisrupTV program to discuss the combined power of AI with industrial IoT.
Hosted by Constellation founder and chairman R “Ray” Wang and Salesforce chief digital evangelist Vala Afshar, Ceciia was also joined on the panel by Snehal Antani, co-founder and CEO of Horizon3.ai (discussing cybersecurity, AI, automated hacking) and Michael Saylor, chairman at MicroStrategy (discussing bitcoin). The panelists are each focused on their common goal of reducing the friction of digital transformation and making life easier for their customers through innovative products and business strategies. Reducing Friction Through Efficient, Intuitive Out-of-the-Box Solutions Cecilia kicked off her part of the conversation by noting commonalities with the other panelists: Webee reduces friction for users by providing tools they can immediately use to access real-time information. This avoids the need to spend months on implementations and millions of dollars on software that generates information no one can act upon. Webee’s bottoms-up approach helps customers adopt new technologies that allow for more organic digital transformation within their organizations. She described how it took the onset of the pandemic for customers to really come to terms with the value of combining AI and IoT, since both technologies enable remote work and remote control of operations. IoT, explained Cecilia, is about much more than connecting sensors and extracting data. It’s also aggregating data from different sources and adding AI so customers can derive real-time insights and position machines to make decisions on their behalf. Cecilia also noted that friction is reduced through the use of Webee’s no-code toolset, which negates the need for engineers and can be set up quickly. The toolset’s rapid deployment capabilities give customers flexibility to play around with its interface and customize dashboards, instead of confronting technological glitches and then wasting time worrying about troubleshooting. Reducing Friction Through Digital Transformation In sharing his perspective on bitcoin, MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor honed in on why he considers bitcoin such a smart and strong investment for companies with excess cash on their balance sheets. He conceptualizes bitcoin as a digital savings account, but notes it is unique from a savings account in that it rapidly appreciates in value. This in turn leads to higher profitability, which has positively impacted MicroStrategy’s ability to invest in both its product line and its employees. He then segued into an overview of MicroStrategy’s latest business objectives, which include an acceleration towards complete digital relationships with clients and an acceleration towards cloud-based technologies. The general theme, said Michael, “is to take the friction out of the value proposition.” In a nutshell, this means reducing all the touchpoints typically required of potential customers who are interested in deploying a new product. Reducing Friction Through Disruptive Technologies Horizon3.ai’s Snehal Antani believes the cybersecurity environment is broken. Modern-day vulnerability scanning tools can identify hundreds of problems, but of those problems only a couple are worth patching. On the cybersecurity penetration testing side, he has noticed vendors are only able to assess a small chunk of their customers’ environments. Leveraging AI-driven technology, he’s focused on creating tools that assess threats not just once a week or every couple weeks, but in a continuous manner. He’s also prioritized building out a team of employees that has a mix of offensive cyber expertise, machine learning and data science expertise and enterprise-grade SaaS expertise. In certain cases, Antani also believes humans are a bottleneck to patching cybersecurity vulnerabilities and can actually create greater friction for customers. One example he cited is an algorithm making 1,000 decisions per second about an attack entry point and a human defender making one decision per minute. Said Antani, “attackers have adapted to the point where humans are now the inefficiency on the defensive side.” In closing out the conversation, Vala said that speed, personalization and intelligence are what is most important to customers in order to reduce friction and give them power. Agree? Disagree? We’re interested in your take on the panel discussion. Tweet us @WebeeLife or visit us on LinkedIn.
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Deploys Quickly Without Coding Into Existing Environments for Complete Real-time Visibility into Growing and Processing Operations of Crops, Grains, Livestock, Poultry and Seafood  APRIL 15, 2021 – SUNNYVALE, CALIF. – Webee SmartFarm™, a turnkey platform purpose-built for connected agriculture that deploys in minutes without technical know-how, was launched today by award-winning industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) innovator Webee. The no-code Webee SmartFarm platform cuts implementation time – even across large operations – from months to days. This enables producers of crops, grains, livestock, poultry and seafood to quickly increase production and reduce disease, for a rapid, measurable return on investment. Webee provides a much-needed alternative to advanced agricultural monitoring solutions that are too time-, engineering- and capital-intensive to justify despite benefits in operational efficiency and product quality. Compatible with existing infrastructure and data sources, Webee SmartFarm makes it easy and affordable to connect an infinite array of sensors for the industry’s most accurate real-time anomaly detection and visibility into any agricultural operation as it scales.
Webee SmartFarm aggregates heterogeneous smart farming sensor data with third-party environmental and other contextual information to create a highly granular picture of the wellness and productivity of live plants and animals or the condition of stored agricultural products. With Webee’s NLP-powered analytics, users can make sense of sensor-generated data by asking questions and receiving answers about the state of their agricultural operations in natural language. In sharp contrast to solutions that require technical talent to code use-case specific applications and dashboards, Webee’s Visual Designer does not require coding or specialized expertise. “Webee combines the best aspects of data engineering and intelligence on top of time series data, putting actionable insight into the hands of users at the exact moment they need it,” said Mike Leone, senior analyst at ESG. “Their flexible platform allows customers to make changes and adjustments in real time across a multitude of use cases out of the box.” Smart Farming Made Simple and Cost Effective Agriculture operators often struggle with the overall complexity of their infrastructures as well as connectivity issues pertaining to geographically dispersed sensors. The inability to immediately correlate anomalies in environmental or disease conditions to harmful effects on plants, animals and stored products can lead to delayed problem detection, inefficiencies and millions of dollars in losses. Since margins are tight, producers also need to see ROI fast, which deters them from making investments in modern but complicated software and hardware technologies that would lead to more streamlined operations. Webee’s cost- and time-effective no-code solution deploys quickly, allows sensors to be connected in places with scarce connectivity without adding any significant additional costs and sends users real-time notifications about anomalies, so they can promptly make necessary changes to preserve and improve agricultural assets. By detecting diseases and other anomalies early, protocols to lower their impact can be activated before disaster strikes. “Webee drastically removes the technical barriers, time and cost for farmers and enterprises to obtain real-time information about their yields and agriculture operations. By supporting a full range of LoRa® devices connected through a LoRaWAN® network , monitoring items such as soil moisture, leaf wetness and among others, the growers can access real-time visibility to prevent diseases in the crops, evaluate the growing process and make decisions related to irrigation without the need for technical skills—improving the quality and efficiency of their production,” said Marc Pegulu, vice president of IoT for Semtech’s Wireless and Sensing Products Group. A renowned coffee company uses leaf wetness sensors to capture the temperature, humidity in the air and the luminosity of the coffee plants. This data is combined with other environmental information and then accessed, processed and analyzed in real time by Webee SmartFarm. This enables them to improve the accuracy of their coffee planting strategy and get ahead of potentially severe problems early on. “We democratize access to the most advanced smart farming technology available today. Many different kinds of agricultural producers approach us with specific indoor, outdoor and in-transit problems that can be addressed with connected solutions. Our customers experience around a 20% increase in operational efficiency or more,” said Webee founder and CEO Lucas Funes. “One such use case involved partnering with a systems integrator to boost egg hatchling results by improving egg hatchling birth rates for poultry producers. The sensors monitoring the industrial egg incubators capture real-time information about factors such as temperature, humidity and ventilation, which is then displayed on a scalable and secure dashboard that can be accessed anytime, from anywhere.” A vast range of agriculture use cases benefit from Webee SmartFarm, including:
Organizations interested in learning more about connected agriculture with the Webee SmartFarm platform can sign up for a live demo. About Webee Webee develops IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) and AI solutions that save enterprises millions of dollars and facilitate sustainable operations through actionable access to real-time data about complex business processes. The company's unique, no-code visual platform for building complex IoT applications for the industrial and commercial markets enables customers to immediately realize ROI from IoT technology without interrupting operations. Webee's patented toolset allows organizations worldwide to improve operational efficiency through easy-to-install sensors and intuitive software that allows the development and deployment of smart applications without coding. Non-intrusive SmartFactory Platform Integrates Easily Into Existing Infrastructures, Gives Users Real-time, End-to-End Visibility into Operational Processes Using Search-driven AI Analytics  APRIL 15, 2021 – SUNNYVALE, CALIF. – Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and AI innovator Webee today announced Webee SmartFactory™, its no-code, turnkey IIoT platform designed specifically for industrial manufacturing enterprises. It makes it possible to connect operations in minutes without the need for technical expertise and cuts industrial IoT deployment time from months to days. Coding-centric solutions for connected manufacturing on the market today create logistical barriers and technical talent gaps that impede manufacturers from moving IIoT projects from POC to production quickly enough to achieve success. Webee SmartFactory upends the status quo by allowing industrial manufacturing enterprises to do so 10 times faster and start realizing ROI right away. Its seamless integration with existing infrastructure and compatibility with heterogeneous data sources is especially beneficial in factory settings.
Before Webee SmartFactory, launching workable IIoT projects was prohibitively time- and capital-intensive, making them challenging to justify despite obvious benefits in long-term operational efficiency and product quality. In sharp contrast to other IoT solutions, Webee’s Visual Designer does not require coding or technical expertise. It enables production line and business users to easily create customized dashboards and IoT applications to aggregate and process heterogeneous industrial sensor data and any relevant third-party data sources to surface actionable insights in real time. Most industrial manufacturing organizations invest millions of dollars in equipment and don’t have time or resources to modernize legacy systems or disrupt business operations. As Senior Analyst at ESG Paul Nashawaty explained, “The last thing customers want is someone interfering with their production lines, so having the ability to access real-time manufacturing data through Webee's non-intrusive approach is a big win. Gaining insights from IoT-created data should be as easy as typing a question into Google. Webee's AI analytics engine has the ability to empower its customers to do exactly that and has been shown to rapidly produce insights no matter the amount of data being processed.” Scalable, Flexible Solution Integrates Easily and Identifies Inefficiencies for Rapid Remediation Rather than making industrial manufacturing users comb through a complicated, disjointed UI, Webee SmartFactory enables users to observe all relevant information about manufacturing status and factory productivity on one screen and make necessary maintenance decisions based on real-time insights. The platform also includes various pre-built modules for connected manufacturing applications and measurements. The NLP-powered search function permits anyone to type in a question in natural language to ask for insights about or to identify problems with any manufacturing operations being monitored. They receive a response – in natural language – that pulls from all relevant data, dynamically surfacing insights tailored to the user asking the question. Data is aggregated from multiple sources in real time, so the user is able to obtain end-to-end visibility with a non-intrusive approach and take corrective action as needed. Webee founder and CEO Lucas Funes noted, “Webee SmartFactory eliminates the need for a costly hiring spree by providing an IoT solution that works out of the box, for a multitude of use cases. Our flexible platform also allows customers to make quick changes and adjustments on the go. It’s a necessary change from how things have been done until now.” Webee SmartFactory is broadly applicable, from standalone manufacturing operations to large multinationals at any scale. Prior to implementing Webee, a Fortune 50 multinational Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) leader relied on a manual, scattershot approach for pulling operational information related to their plants and laboratories. With Webee, they access multiple dashboards centrally and generate data visualizations that give them the insights they need about all elements of production and manufacturing cycles in real time. Leveraging battery powered, long-range LoRa® devices connected through a LoRaWAN® network they are able to gain visibility from non-connected machines to alert plant managers about production bottlenecks and machine maintenance needs. They now receive instant alerts that eliminate product losses and give them visibility. Webee has also made it easy for them to replicate processes and normalize monitoring across their factories around the world, which is particularly useful when they acquire new companies with different operations. End-to-end Industrial Manufacturing Solution Processes IoT Data Without Engineers Getting IoT projects off the ground the traditional way is especially challenging due to the intricacy, scale and high costs involved with most industrial manufacturing operations. Accessing information about factory status often requires manual programming, and with it, specialized engineering skills. Additionally, the repetitive and monotonous nature of this work can lead to errors and squander valuable time that would be better spent elsewhere. Implementing and scaling IIoT projects typically requires lengthy deployments and specialized resources. Retrofitting legacy systems so they’re compatible with newer equipment and connecting sensors is cost-prohibitive and can cause significant business disruption. Organizations must decide on their technology, hardware and sensors, then have engineers program workflows and create applications. A 2020 Beecham Research study found that 50% of companies across industries failed to take IoT initiatives past proof of concept because of the sheer complexity of implementing IoT solution components. And in Microsoft’s 2020 IoT Signals report, 28% of organizations polled cited budget as a barrier to further IoT adoption and 26% cited lack of technical knowledge. “The biggest problem with industrial manufacturing IoT implementations is that they’re too complex,” Funes continued. “You need engineers who understand how to extract data and put it into a database. You need data scientists skilled in processing data. You need programmers who can write code for APIs or to send SMS or emails to notify the business that the temperature of a given machine in a facility needs to be adjusted to avoid downtime and improve efficiency. Then you need to put all these pieces together. This is all expensive and takes too much time. There has to be a better way. This is why we purpose-built the Webee SmartFactory platform.” Patented Technology for Sophisticated Real-Time Industrial Manufacturing Diagnostics Webee’s patented smart object recognition and anomaly detection technologies work in concert with its search-driven AI analytics to drive granular diagnostics of complex industrial manufacturing systems in real time.
Industrial manufacturing enterprises interested in learning more about Webee can sign up for a live demo. About Webee Webee develops IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) and AI solutions that save enterprises millions of dollars and facilitate sustainable operations through actionable access to real-time data about complex business processes. The company's unique, no-code visual platform for building complex IoT applications for the industrial and commercial markets enables customers to immediately realize ROI from IoT technology without interrupting operations. Webee's patented toolset allows organizations worldwide to improve operational efficiency through easy-to-install sensors and intuitive software that allows the development and deployment of smart applications without coding. Our co-founder and CEO Lucas Funes recently joined Eric Kavanagh on his DM Radio show to share perspectives on IoT and why IoT is just getting started. DM Radio is the longest running broadcast show about data where industry experts come together to discuss hot topics in tech.
When asked about Webee customer deployments, Lucas detailed how end-users want actionable insights while accessing data in real time. Non-technical users are building and scaling solutions and connecting existing technologies within Webee’s easy-to-use low-code canvas, Lucas explained. This solves an overwhelming and prolific IoT industry challenge; the lack of highly skilled IoT talent. Closing the IoT Knowledge Gap Legacy IoT solutions require highly technical engineers to keep up with the code-centric platforms. This is both expensive and time-prohibitive; the process can take up to ten months, Lucas explained. “If someone in the world already built a piece of code, why would you need to rewrite it yourself?” Webee eliminates the knowledge gap, freeing end-users to easily operate its solution with a drag-and-drop interface, regardless of skill level. It’s Time to Stop Reinventing the Wheel Lucas also shared how Webee eliminates the need for customers to constantly reinvent the wheel: “Any user that generates applications or code/pieces of code can publish it in an open marketplace, allowing other enterprises to leverage the knowledge.” He explained that users pulling existing information from the marketplace do not need to be trained as data scientists. Any user can simply drag and drop the portion of code or application they want to use and implement it into their Webee dashboard. To date, Webee has thousands of enterprise users and supports over 700 device types and protocols, eliminating the need to put engineers through onboarding processes for new devices or sensors. Supporting the Food, Beverage and Agriculture Industries with Out-of-the-Box Solutions Eric was interested in learning how Webee markets its product to target clients. Lucas explained that the Webee platform can be used in various verticals, and their current focus is the food, beverage and agriculture industries. “We focus on the beginning of the supply chain in manufacturing and agriculture. We believe that digital transformation will not be successful through a top-down approach.” In speaking with production and plant managers directly, Webee can determine the organization’s pain points. This, in turn, enables organizations to create the foundation for their digital transformation initiatives from the bottom-up. To hear more from Lucas and other IoT experts, listen to DM Radio’s full episode. |
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