Blynk, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year following its launch in 2014, recently announced a partnership with The Things Conference, an event focused on LoRaWAN and low-power IoT, in a move that the company’s Founder and CEO, Pavlo Bayborodin and President, Iryna Liashchuk, expect to have a significant impact on the industry, they told IoT Insider.
Blynk is a low-code IoT platform designed to help their customers, who are typically manufacturers, with building connected devices easily. Their use cases span from agriculture to consumer electronics and industrial HVAC.
“We’re not the only ones [offering a platform],” explained Liashchuk. “Yet, the standard for bigger companies is to begin their own solution in house – they use tools out there like AWS and Azure – and they create a custom solution which is expensive, complex and has to be maintained.”
Blynk’s value proposition is taking on this cost and complexity, “taking it off the companies’ shoulders,” as Liashchuk put it, and also thinking keenly about the user experience once a device has been launched on the market and is connected.
“What is the user experience afterwards?” Bayborodin posed. “Who will be using it, who will be activating it, who will be looking at the data, and who will be receiving notifications and alerts?”
Tailoring connectivity
Prior to the partnership, Blynk tailored a lot of their solutions to Wi-Fi – in recognition of what a lot of their customers were using for their connectivity.
“However, we see a big development in the direction of cellular,” said Bayborodin. “LoRA is very popular.”
He noted an emergence in having a “failsafe option”, in the form of “multi connectivity”. “This is the new thing, and we see more and more customers are choosing a combination of Wi-Fi and cellular or cellular and Ethernet, or cellular and satellites.”
The connectivity ultimately comes down to the use case and the industry vertical, which varies. “If it’s a stationary object, in the city, then LoRa or Wi-Fi or Ethernet are suited,” said Bayborodin. “If it’s a moving object, you should pick either LoRa or cellular.”
“Although cellular has been democratised quite a bit and the coverage is great, the cost is still a concern for some companies,” added Liashchuk, “especially if they have data-heavy use cases. Cellular is not good for that; it will eat up a lot of data very quickly.”
Adding LoRaWAN
“Our customers have been requesting LoRawAN, so it was partially driven by the demand,” said Liashchuk of the decision to partner. “We’ve been working with agricultural companies, and others, and they’ve been asking us for years, ‘When will you bring in LoRaWAN connectivity as an option on your platform?’”
One meaningful aspect of the partnership is that the LoRaWAN community is given access to Blynk’s no-code app building and device management platform and in turn, Blynk users gain access to The Things Stack’s LoRaWAN coverage – meaning devices can be connected in remote or hard-to-reach locations, opening up new use cases where connectivity may not previously have been possible.
“We’re excited about it because our users are excited about it,” Liashchuk added.
In an example given, Bayborodin referred to construction: “Let’s say someone who’s working on the construction side is monitoring the air quality for all sorts of compliance. They can get an off-the-shelf sensor, connect it to The Things network, log into Blynk, connect your Things network account, and all the devices will be there.”
One point Liashchuk made was that managing workflows can be challenging, even for the larger companies who are presumed to have more resources. “It’s easy to connect devices and keep them connected,” she said; “What’s not easy is the nuances nobody tends to think about when they start a project; how do you transfer that device if it needs to be moved? How do you manage permissions, so different employees can access different data?”
In addition to Blynk’s partnership with The Things Conference, the company has partnered with Blues, to harness its no-code app development tools; National Control Devices (NCD) to use its industrial-grade hardware; and with DPTechnics, most recently, using its cellular-enabled board.
As well as establishing new partnerships being an important part of Blynk’s future strategy, they’re also looking to expand their connectivity options and continue to grow.
“Whatever architecture you’re using, whatever connectivity you’re using, Blynk is there to help,” Liashchuk concluded, in an apt statement about the company’s mission.
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