Minnesota-based Digi used last week’s Embedded World show in Nuremberg to demonstrate how important cellular connectivity has become for the IoT world.

Back in 2005, the company’s focus was on Zigbee short-range communications, but these days it covers the broader IoT spectrum

“We are now focused on cellular IoT,” said Bob Blumenscheid, senior product marketing manager at Digi. “We are making a major push into cellular IoT to spread our XBee range everywhere.”

This meant, he said, a module could track and monitor a single SKU that could be deployed anywhere in the world.

“You don’t need to worry about where it is shipping,” he said. “We are focussing on smart security, asset tracking, and remote monitoring and control.”

At the show, the company had a smart sensor demonstration that transferred data from the edge to the cloud. It worked with North American company Sparkfun, which provided a group of sensors.

“We took the data from the sensors through our XBee cellular device and sent them out through the LTE cellular network,” said Blumenscheid. “We are going out through the LTE network in Germany and sending it to the cloud in North America.”

Digi has created a connected development kit for engineers to see what is going on remotely from where they can reload code or change things. It worked with ST Microelectronics on this.

Blumenscheid also spoke about the ongoing security problems facing the industry.

“There are security risks coming out all the time,” he said. “We have a service where we monitor new threats and help our customers keep secure. We help the customer right the way through to the product in the field. We are traditionally a hardware company and moved into software and services helping customers create connected products.”