Techneed forays in to Sri Lankan IOT industry

Techneed Ltd., one of Sri Lanka’s growing high-tech IoT start-ups, has announced the deployment of its ‘Nurve IOT Gateway’ in one of the largest telecommunications service providers in Sri Lanka. Essentially, the gateway enables the service provider to centrally monitor the environment variables in the machine room, such as temperature, humidity, movements, water level, etc. from the network operations centre (NOC), thus enabling improvements in operational efficiency.

The cutting-edge gateway device has been already deployed at close to 500 remote unmanned stations. The purpose-built device is designed, fabricated and manufactured locally by Techneed’s own skilled resources consisting of hardware and software devops (development and operations) engineers. Essentially, the sensors attached to the gateway primarily keep track on the environment, and based on the reading and the values set in the sensor, the signal is digitally converted and carried over the IP network, thus providing a representation of the state of the environment in the station, in a graphical format. The NOC staff thus can understand the state of all stations, and activate personnel to attend to fault as and when needed. This has improved productivity and operational efficiency manifold to the telecom service provider. 

Techneed has a rich portfolio of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN)-based IOT sensors  for all situations such as, water level monitoring, temperature and humidity monitoring, movement monitoring, to name a few. This is pivotal in providing solutions in Smart Car Park Management, Smart Waste Management, and Smart Water Management. Particularly the sensors and gateways are based on LORA protocol and CAT-M IOT technologies. 

Techneed Co-Founder and CTO Buddhika Kondasinghe said: “Techneed has fit-for-purpose home-based IOT Systems and sensors to cater the Smart Home requirement. There are three challenges in deploying any of the IOT based projects; first, understanding the use case and designing and building out the sensors, gateway and the associated communication channel; second is aggregating all the sensor data and device information, to a hosted IOT middleware in the cloud; and third challenge is value adding to provide management reports, analytics, and integrating to the enterprise productivity tools such as ERP.” Techneed provides design, planning, manufacturing, deployment and maintenance in all three areas mentioned above, setting the stage to be the only ICT company in Sri Lanka, able to provide an end to end delivery of an IOT solution.  

Kondasinghe further added: “If such a holistic direction and thought process as outlined above is not taken – the IOT project is definite to head to a disaster. The IT and OT managers in enterprises should understand that IOT deployments are a natural extension, and supplemental to its IT initiatives and thus being of high strategic relevance.”

The device management, sensor aggregation, application integration, user interface (UI) presentation, are implemented in the Nurve IOT middleware which is able to be hosted in a cloud agnostic manner in the data centre of preference of the customer. This enables integration to specialised analytics tools and company ERP systems, through common representational state transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (API’s), thereby providing management reports and operational insights to the top management. Furthermore the Nurve middleware has an easy to use integrated development environment (IDE), which enables engineers and consultants to create integration scripts in Java and PHP languages.