Published on 05/07/2017 | Technology
When we started CANDI in 2009, an incredible confluence of technologies was beginning. There were new generations of mobile displays, Internet access everywhere, and a deluge of low-cost smart devices that were all leading to an unprecedented connection of the “things” in people’s lives.
Because our background was in distributed device and control networks, we saw this as a unique opportunity to upset the traditional approach to building automation. By connecting devices and data to new Internet of Things (IoT) smart building services, we could help lower operating costs, improve efficiency, save energy, and reduce waste. But despite the new technologies and networks, the elephant in the room was that a key part of the puzzle hadn’t been solved: interoperability.
By breaking away from the old siloes and normalizing an API to allow access to any device, we could change the entire value proposition of modern control systems.
What we are seeing is nothing less than a replay of the 1990s router wars set on a different stage. Many start-ups approached VCs at the time with single-protocol solutions and slides declaring “the world will be red!” or “the world will be blue!”
Only Cisco, a tiny sub-50-person company that no one outside of Stanford had heard of said, “um, no, it will be a rainbow” and offered a multiprotocol solution that interoperated with everything in the market.
Fast forward to 2016 and we find smart buildings and IoT in exactly the same boat. IoT needs its rainbow.
The fact is most devices, apps, and web services are inherently incompatible. Whether by design or necessity, a maze of different device protocols exists as a barrier to innovation, interoperability, and choice. But without interoperability, data and devices are isolated from each other and can’t work effectively on behalf of people and the environment. In essence, lack of interoperability has put an entire technology upgrade cycle into a holding pattern.
If CANDI could solve this interoperability problem, we felt we could change the controls industry dynamic to let people choose whatever products and brands they needed for the job at hand. By breaking away from the old siloes and normalizing an API to allow access to any device, we could multiply the benefits of control systems with the power of open source software, new app platforms, new data streams, a world of great products, and economies of scale. All that in turn should spawn many new use cases across global markets.
Product innovators and engineers have good reasons to use the various embedded communication schema they choose—MODBus, BACNet, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, and the many implementations within those and other layers. No one size fits all products. Technology, requirements, and protocols evolve over time, and controls industry history shows that companies rarely conform to standards. Despite everyone’s best intentions, standards will continue to be introduced, debated, evolved, and inconsistently used in our increasingly heterogeneous world. In our view, promoting a single universal communications standard at the product level cannot possibly keep up with the Precambrian explosion of IoT products in today’s increasingly connected environments. From our decades of experience in systems integration, we knew that a scalable, protocol- and communications-agnostic interoperability solution had to operate at a higher layer.
This is where CANDI comes in.
CANDI stands for “Cloud-Assisted Network-Device Integration.” Over the last seven years we have done the heavy lifting required to solve the vexing interoperability problem by enabling data exchange between incompatible devices and services via a flexible, open translation layer at the edge of the network. Using a service bus architecture, we abstract and simplify the complexity of multiple protocols. This has the effect of “normalizing” machine-to-machine and machine-to-cloud communications.
We solve for interoperability by enabling data exchange between incompatible devices and services via a flexible, open translation layer at the edge of the network.
Today CANDI allows developers, systems integrators, and building owner/operators to quickly realize and connect innovative services and apps to a huge array of existing legacy and next-generation endpoint hardware. In short, we make it easy to connect without the hassle of interpreting countless low-level protocols, embedding proprietary agents, or spending long hours programming costly hardware devices. CANDI’s architecture makes any networked device easily addressable on its own terms, with proper authentication, from anywhere in the world.
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