Iamus: Fueling Smart IoT Ecosystems

Oliver Goh, CEO

The world population is on an uncontrollable rise, and the average lifespan of people continues to increase causing new cities to emerge, and the old ones to swell up. In this scenario, cities’ policy makers, face considerable challenges to aid urbanization. On the bright side, the proliferation of technologies is enabling city administrators to bring radical changes in the existing status quo of cities through giving a new dimension to construction, transportation, and other elements of infrastructure of an ecosystem commencing way to smart cities.

Oliver Goh, CEO of Iamus—a provider of a scalable software platform and a portfolio of industry solutions to create innovative ecosystems—points out that there are many challenges in developing a smart city. “First of all, it depends on how keenly the city administration is interested in smart city projects. Next, certain departments get lured by market buzzwords and initiate smart city plans without having a proper strategy or blueprint,” states the industry veteran. True to his words, smart city projects are often driven by increasing infrastructure needs, which creates additional supply burdens on the current transit systems, power grids, and water processing units. To this end, many developed states are leveraging the potential of green technology and IoT to keep up with infrastructure demands for smart city projects.

The story of a three-year old firm—Iamus adds more light to the story. Based in Lithuania, Iamus enables its clients to create robust and innovative data ecosystem solutions for cities, public and private organizations, manufacturers, retailers, and the hospitality sector. With its proprietary suite of solutions, Iamus aids its clients to develop smart ecosystems through minimizing human error, increasing efficiency, reducing operational costs, and creating new revenue streams. Additionally, the company also sets a pre-defined timeline to complete specific projects by comprehending the key pain points of a city and its citizens. “We give granular details of the change in operations to our clients and greater control to respond to any situation,” he quips.

To substantiate the statement, Goh cites a use case. “For instance, we have a city where 60 cruise ships are coming from May to August.” In this case, when these ships enter the city most of the people leave their ships and go to the town to do shopping or visit certain tourist spots. However, here the shipowners or administrators do not have actual figures of people who left the ship. “Further as people often form big groups to visit desired places; ship owners face more difficulties in tracing them.” Now, the tourist department of the city wants passengers to visit certain attractions but cannot direct people to preferred tourist spots. In this case, Iamus tracks their mobile device to find their present location along with using digital signage to direct peoples to spots that draws more crowds. “We place ads or pictures that can entice the people based on their interests,” says Goh. This enables the visitors’ to navigate to their desired locations and subsequently aids in splitting large groups into smaller ones.

Our solutions give our clients a comprehensive set of information about their operations, and a greater control to respond to any situation

Once the firm analyzes the movement patterns of visitors, the next slot is maneuvered in a more optimum way. This is particularly useful for planning city festivals and set up attractions in places, which optimizes the flow of people and spreads it evenly. If a festival is going on a certain part of a city, public attractions will be in that area, and in this case, the other half of the town is empty. To eradicate the chaos in a specific location, the firm ensures that the public is evenly distributed and parking is available at all the prime locations.

SmartNodes

“We provide a comprehensive portfolio of easily deployable solutions, with our Service Delivery Framework (SDF) as the foundation,” points Goh. With SDF, smart city enthusiasts get instant access to an integrated and scalable cloud-based infrastructure that enables customers to rapidly respond to market changes, drive innovation, and build an enterprise while supporting bottom-line growth. The firm’s proprietary SmartNodes sensor technology aids its clients in data gathering and supplementing the traffic flow and parking optimization along with reducing the cost of waste and energy management. “Our smart city solutions are adaptable, scalable, and can be tailored to your city’s needs to deliver a new quality of life,” extols Goh. SmartNodes comes in various forms and levels of computational power, from a single sensor to a standalone cloudlet. They can instantly backup other SmartNodes when needed, ensuring a highly reliable system. Data from SmartNodes is sent to SDF that contains and enforces operational rules. In turn, SDF sends instructions back to the SmartNodes that manage the functions of external devices accordingly. Powered by Intel Gateway Solutions, Iamus SmartNodes is bringing smart technology into the light of the day by connecting and controlling building automation systems, household appliances, and mobile environments. The product connects with cloud-based SDF and makes a repertoire of applications and services available for building monitoring, analysis, automation, and control.

SmartSpheres – state of the art industry blueprints

The aim of a smart city is to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of its inhabitants by underpinning local area development and harnessing technology that leads to smart outcomes. Every city has its own culture, unique infrastructure, and funding technologies; therefore technology adoption can vary in diverse ways. “Using tested, robust building blocks, we tailor our solutions to meet specific client requirements,” states Goh. Iamus offers SmartSpheres, which are essentially industry solution blueprints—a set of pre-configured tools and applications tailored to specific spheres that include smart cities, retail, hospitality, and manufacturing. SmartSpheres can transform regular operations of these different areas into inter-connected ecosystems for commerce and social interaction. Iamus’ innovative approach involves collecting information from clients regarding their goals and current challenges. Together with the client, Iamus arrives at a quantifiable image of their business benefitting from the company’s solutions, along with clear timelines, milestones, and potential risks. With the vision in place, it only takes a few weeks for Iamus to build a proof of concept, which is subjected to rigorous quality control and many simulations.

Before the final rollout, a pilot project is installed and tested in real-world conditions to refine every aspect of the solution.

The Growing Prowess

Owing to these exemplary works, the firm has continually scaled to heights by addressing the dire needs of many sectors. Recently, Iamus completed a beach project where it handled the various discrepancies in beach operations and streamlined it with its market-proven solution. With its proprietary IoT product, the company informed tourists of various factors before they entered the beach such as wind conditions or the water levels and its current temperature. They were also informed about the present crowd, and a map was rendered to show the dangerous areas of swimming along with guiding them about the nearest restaurants based on their taste buds. The firm has worked for the retail sector and has helped individuals to know the price nomenclature based on the location of malls.

An Innovative Touchpoint to Manufacturing Operations

To elucidate the firm’s capabilities in the manufacturing realm, Goh delineates Iamus’ association with a Germany-based cosmetics factory. Here, the client had many production lines and any minute machine failure was resulting in hours of downtime. To help them in this, the firm installed its framework and connected with all the machines present in the shop. “We also created a dashboard that enabled the concerned manager to comprehend the discrepancies in the process and accordingly act on it to preempt machine failure in the future,” mentions Goh. Further, he states that while initiating smart cities projects, governments and corporate units are often unaware of the areas they need to digitalize. In this context, Iamus does a workshop where its prospects are explained about the complete vision of smart cities projects and advancements they can have from the current scenario. “After that, we implement the physical installation, which means looking at networking issue, security and access issues, and then looking at the content of whatever is required.”

Furthermore, Iamus recently got a project to improve the informational infrastructure of Klaipeda. “We have developed the City Kiosk, a robust device with a large touch screen that displays navigation, weather, and event information, as well as being a WiFi hotspot.” These City Kiosks were strategically located around the city center and played a significant role in assisting both residents and tourists in knowing their cities better.

"We are eager to continuously learn from our clients and are committed to being a dependable partner for anyone seeking future-proof iot solutions that ensure mutual success"

Going ahead, Iamus envisions expanding its base to Africa and South Africa. Currently, the firm operates from Singapore, Europe, Munich, and Tanzania. The company had a staggering growth of over 70 percent this year and aims to sustain the same in the years ahead. “So from next year we plan to double that number and then work on to create certain benchmarking tools.” Offering tailored solutions to meet specific client requirements, Iamus completes projects efficiently and within shorter times. “We are eager to learn from our clients continuously and are committed to being a dependable partner for anyone seeking future-proof IoT solutions that ensure mutual success,” concludes Goh.