Integrating IoT quickly with little or no code is the goal Faircom set itself when it developed its Edge platform, according to Mike Bowers, the company’s head of marketing, speaking at this week’s IoT Tech Expo in London.

Faircom Edge is a converged industrial IoT hub, combining an MQTT broker with a web server and a fully functional database. It lets organisations easily access, share and leverage IoT data, removing the need for complex integration and administration.

At the same time, it is a lightweight and portable option that can run anywhere – on the device, at the edge or in the cloud. It also bridges industry standard protocols with support for MQTT, OPC UA, Siemens Simatic 7 and ThingWorx AlwaysOn, while at the same time persisting messages to its underlying database for interactive analytics via standard SQL.

“The goal is to give you data quickly so you can do something with them,” said Bowers. “Data are expensive to collect, transform, deliver and bridge across protocols. Faircom Edge does that automatically, no matter where you are in the world, for Industry 4.0, smart hospitals, smart cities, smart retail and so on.”

One of the beauties of the system, he said, was that it would carry on collecting data when it was not connected and then automatically deliver the data when it became connected.

This could be useful for, say, a smart scooter application where the rider sometimes takes it into areas where there is no connectivity.

And it runs on the major operating systems such as Linux, Android and Windows. But not iOS yet. Bowers said the company was working on that and maybe it would be available next year.

“It automatically bridges across protocols,” he said. “You can come in anyway you want and out anyway you want. We bridge the world completely. And if you don’t have a protocol, we will build it. We are really good at building protocols.”

The system also works with all the major cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google.