According to a recent series of announcements, IoTium, secure network infrastructure company for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), has closed more than $8 million in Series A financing and made available a new Network as a Service (NaaS) offering.
The NaaS product is designed to securely connect legacy onsite systems in mission-critical environments and accelerate the deployment of Industry 4.0 at scale.
“IIoT has the power to transform industries. However, the promise of IIoT in mission critical environments such as building and industrial automation, oil and gas, manufacturing, transportation and the smart city industries has yet to be realized,” said Ron Victor, founder and CEO, IoTium. “The key issues facing these industrial environments in the adoption of IIoT are deployment complexities and security. IoTium’s highly secure solution enables these industrial environments to easily connect their legacy control and automation systems to greenfield applications in public, private and hybrid clouds or datacenters, without sacrificing security, something mission-critical environments just can’t compromise on.”
Deployment complexity and security concerns have caused a widespread lag in the adoption of IIoT, while traditional IT methods using command line interfaces, usernames and passwords, and changes to enterprise proxy and firewall policies are not effective scale in OT and IIoT.
“When it comes to realizing the promise of the IIoT to improve performance of equipment systems, security and simplicity are critical,” said John Petze, Principal, SkyFoundry, an IoTium customer. “With our SkySpark Analytics software running on IoTium’s NaaS solution, customers benefit from secure connectivity and easily deployment of software across distributed computing systems that connect to the equipment systems from the edge to the enterprise level. The IIoT creates tremendous opportunity to generate value from device data. Analytics are key to maximizing ROI in factory environments.”
The $8.39 million Series A round was led by March Capital Partners and GE Ventures, and joined by Pankaj Patel, former EVP and Chief Development Officer at Cisco, in addition to OpenSource Ventures and Juniper Networks (News - Alert). The company said it will use the capital infusion to accelerate its building and industrial automation verticals, and expand its footprint in the oil and gas, transportation and smart city industries with the new NaaS solution.
“The biggest problem impacting the uptake of the IIoT at scale is security and deployment complexity,” said Victor. “With the help of our new investment partners, we are enabling the expansion of IIoT by making it possible for any type of organization to securely connect legacy mission critical industrial assets to the cloud with minimal IT Intervention and absolutely no changes to enterprise security policy.”