Developing Proof of Concept –
PoC for IoT Implementations

Ans. With a PoC development approach for IoT projects, your organization can leverage the following long-term benefits:

• Validation of your IoT design at the nascent stage: With the Proof of Concept PoC approach, you get to validate and identify the feasibility of your IoT project at 10-15% of the total development cost.
• Validation of design partner’s expertise: By the end of the PoC phase, you can assess if the IoT design partner has the expertise and ability to understand your business objectives clearly and act accordingly. The IP rights of the Proof of Concept PoC designs are always enjoyed by the customer. Hence you can approach another vendor with the PoC design, in case the need arises.
• Identification of the potential challenges: While working in IoT PoC development, one gets hands-on experience and understanding of some of the potential challenges and failures well before the onset of the actual development process. This provides a lot of scope to modify the original design accordingly and prevent expensive errors.
• Component Reusability & Cost Savings by 10-15%: At Embitel, while designing the IoT PoC, we choose and use the software & peripheral components that can be re-used during full-fledged implementation of the IoT project. This helps you in saving 10-15% of the overall development cost.

Ans. There is no precise metrics on how much of customized or off-the-shelf components one can use for Proof of Concept PoC development.

It purely depends upon your project requirement and PoC goals to be demonstrated.

But based on our experience, we have seen that 100% of the hardware components are off-the-shelf components.

Meanwhile, about 20-30% of the software modules are off-the-shelf.

Some of the off-the-shelf software modules include the standard device drivers s/w, multimedia software, and the GIS Software (Geographic Information System).

Ans. Once the PoC stage is completed successfully and the required results have been successfully demonstrated, we scale it up for full-scale IoT implementation.

In our PoC, we make it a point to use software and hardware components that can be reused during the full-scale implementation. In our experience of collaborating with various customers for IoT PoC development, the re-use of components helps in saving 10-15% of the overall development cost.

The journey ahead also becomes more predictable, since your in-house team would have now developed more trust and confidence in the capabilities of our IoT software and hardware development teams!

Ans. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is designed for Beta customer testing, with an objective to test the feasibility of the IoT project design.

The MVP design is meant for market release to the intended end-users, but by using minimum number of resources and with only mission-critical functionalities. The idea is to learn from the feedback of a sample target audience, validate, and scale-up!

For example, you want to check overall oil loss occurring in a fuel delivery system of your Petroleum plant, as part of an IoT solution.

In this case, a minimum viable product includes the minimum number of hardware & software components that can demonstrate the reduction of cost associated with oil spill.

We use the real-time data from the production environment and run it over the PoC setup, which consists of carefully designed hardware and software components.

The results to be demonstrated at the Proof of Concept PoC stage are as close to the final IoT implementation goals, a possible.

Ans. No. We charge a very nominal fee for our IoT PoC development services.

Proof of Concept – PoC development uses minimum resources that cost about 10-15% of the actual IoT development costs. And as already mentioned, most of the components in our PoC development are selected so that they can be reused.

Coming to the second part of the question, if the results are not in line with your expectations, our team will sync-up with you for root cause analysis and find alternative solutions. This also gives you a chance to identify any error in the objective or an error in the IoT design.

Ans.  The IP rights of the PoC design are owned by our customers. Additionally, the assurance about the confidentiality of crucial information is taken care of, under the NDA agreement.

Our team developing PoC for IoT projects have the following skillsets:

• Embedded Programming
• Board Support Package (BSP) design
• Network design & engineering expertise
• Firmware Engineering experience
• Hardware Engineering (PCB Design, Mobile app development)
• Expertise in Linux and Android (Non-Linux) programming
• Software skills (C#, .Net, Python)
• Expertise in EMI/EMC testing
• Android Application development skills
• Knowledge of standard Network protocols like: Ethernet, BLE, WiFi, Profinet, ModBus, etc.

The tools used in a Proof of Concept PoC can vary with the design complexity, & the goals to be demonstrated at the PoC stage.

Here is the basic list of our PoC development tools for various IoT projects:

• Allegro Toolkit (Allegro PCB platform, Allegro Design Authoring & more)
• CADENCE toolkit (for chip design, IC package design, PCB design etc.)
• Eclipse IDE
• Yocto Framework
• Python for Coding
• Debugging Tools

This is not a comprehensive list of tools used in Proof of Concept POC development. For more details about the tools and our PoC development activities, get in touch with our IoT leadership team.