Particle announced on Tuesday Particle Cloud, its enterprise IoT platform, which is being used by companies to ship secure, reliable, and easy-to-use IoT products in as little as six months.
The Particle Cloud empowers creation of new IoT products and solutions. It provides a secure, reliable gateway between devices and the web, and allows users to manage their devices and the data flowing from them. It’s flexible, easy to use, and reduces technical risk and time to market.
Particle Cloud provides the necessary infrastructure to connect physical devices to the web and expose their functionality through a secure API, as well as a suite of software development tools and a Device Management Console for managing a “fleet” of connected devices. Enterprise customers can also upgrade to get private cloud deployments, enterprise uptime SLAs, enterprise support contracts, pre-built integrations with data management and analytics platforms, access controls and audit logs to track activity in the system, and storage of events and data published by devices.
In order to deliver a complete solution to customers, Particle has partnered with Google, Microsoft, IFTTT, and a number of other data and analytics cloud platforms who help customers generate insights from the massive quantities of data produced by IoT products. The company has also partnered with semiconductor companies like Broadcom, Cypress, u-blox, and ST to deliver its hardware solutions, and cellular connectivity providers like Twilio, T-Mobile, and Telefonica to provide networking.
Its partner ecosystem also includes more than 50 professional services companies like Lunar Design, Sigma Connectivity, and Jabil who can help customers develop both their physical IoT product and the software applications those devices will communicate with.
Particle became famous for the Spark Core, the Photon and Electron, their hardware development kits for creating IoT prototypes. These “dev kits” rely on Particle Cloud, the company’s IoT PaaS cloud platform. To date, they have shipped more than 120,000 dev kits and built a community of 70,000 software developers and hardware engineers developing new IoT products and solutions with Particle.
With a community of over 70,000 developers, the speed and agility of the Particle platform has been proven on projects large and small, and Particle Cloud makes these products scalable and enterprise-ready.
Typically, building an IoT product takes 18 to 36 months and costs millions of dollars. With Particle, engineers and developers can build their first prototype in an afternoon with an inexpensive hardware development kit (US$19), and can move incrementally to pilot hundreds or thousands of units and eventually to a full-scale roll-out of 100 thousand units or more. This model allows product creators and OEMs to iterate quickly and ship a higher-quality product faster.
“The Internet of Things is a new industry with huge potential. However, the unfortunate reality is that many businesses’ IoT initiatives flounder or fail,” said Zach Supalla, Particle co-founder and CEO. “The strongest business case for building an IoT product is irrelevant if you can’t execute. Companies who work with Particle actually ship their products.”
