DevicePilot launches Core, shrinking the cost to manage smart devices at scale to pennies or less

Core enables companies to scale quickly and cheaply to millions of connected devices 

LONDON, May 17, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- DevicePilot, the service management platform for smart energy and smart home companies, today announced the launch of DevicePilot Core. Core is DevicePilot's first major update since the company's launch in 2016. It enables customers to manage their smart products at costs as low as 1p per device per month, reducing both the human and machine costs required for maintaining large estates of connected devices. Core solves major challenges for companies in consumer electronics, utilities, and electric vehicle charging, who are struggling to maintain device performance and service quality as they scale to meet demand. Overcoming these challenges is especially important now as consumers move away from fossil fuels by adopting smart energy products that need to work reliably. Core can also scale to tens of millions of devices, which the legacy DevicePilot platform could not do.

Consumer electronics and utilities companies can struggle with the shift away from 'dumb' devices sold as standalone products. The trend towards smart devices that deliver an ongoing service with recurring revenue is more complex and costly to support, especially at scale. Core helps customers deliver service quality efficiently as they grow, by giving companies total visibility of the performance and condition of their smart products – from individual devices to the entire fleet.

Device vendors coming from the world of dumb devices may only troubleshoot or fix problems reactively once a customer complains. However, smart devices facilitate more proactive detection and resolution. Core allows issues to be detected, diagnosed, and even automatically resolved proactively, driven by the device's live telemetry. Core helps customers automate many management tasks across their device estate, including routine maintenance, customer support and software updates.

Core offers flexible deployment options to give customers control of their costs – available either as a fully-managed SaaS or deployed directly into customer's AWS account. It is a low code / no code platform built on Apache Flink, so it can be used by any team, not just developers. It frees smart product companies from building their own custom service management tools. The automation of service management also saves human resources, since many tasks can be completed without human intervention from customer support or engineering. Core also cuts cloud costs, since companies can move processing out of general-purpose data stores which can be expensive at scale.

DevicePilot CEO and co-founder Pilgrim Beart also founded AlertMe, a company sold to Centrica British Gas for $100m in 2015 as the platform for its Hive brand, so Beart understands the challenges that face smart device vendors. 

"Smart products are not really products at all - they are a service," said Beart. "The adjustment from product developer to service provider can be difficult and costly. Building your own support tools, and scaling up your support teams in proportion to a growing device estate, is a super-inefficient way to grow. With DevicePilot Core, we want to show smart device makers that there's a better way. With cloud costs of around one pence per month per device at scale, Core can reduce human costs and machine cost in one fell swoop, while driving up service quality. Vendors gain total visibility of their device estate and use their data to fix issues faster, automate 95% of jobs, and solve problems before the customer even notices. It makes for happier customers, reduces customer churn, and helps businesses to scale at speed." 

About DevicePilot 

DevicePilot is a SaaS company based in London, UK, providing service monitoring, management and automation primarily in the Smart Energy and Smart Home markets, including incident management, performance management and business automation. For example the company works with leading Chargepoint Operator (CPO) Pod Point to help deliver higher service availability, lower operational costs and faster growth. Unlike DIY systems, the tool is easy to use and infinitely scalable.

DevicePilot Core specifications

Price

Machine costs for Core are in the region of £0.01 per device per month when applied at scale e.g. a device estate of 1,000,000+. 

Deployment options

Core is available as a fully-managed SaaS or deployed directly into AWS as licensed IP. DevicePilot can also offer systems integration with other off-the-shelf services to deliver a complete solution.

Integrations

Core can sync with 200+ business applications and CRMs including Salesforce, Slack, Zendesk, Hubspot, for example to automatically raise a ticket in Salesforce Service Cloud, enriched with a problem diagnosis and all information necessary for a customer service agent to take quick action.

Engine

Under the hood, DevicePilot Core uses Apache Flink as its stateful streaming analytics engine – a mature open source project used by Netflix, Uber etc. to process millions of events per second. Customers can save money by moving service management queries out of generic databases such as Elastic, AWS Timestream, Athena, InfluxDB etc. and into DevicePilot Core, which has a much more powerful analytical model.

Usability

Core is a "low code / no code" service, meaning that it can be used and understood by operations staff, not just developers. It still requires some level of technical understanding, but it's more like using a spreadsheet than writing code.

Compatibility

Core works with any kind of device - it is entirely agnostic and can have any format and any schema. It integrates entirely in the cloud.

Scale

DevicePilot Core can seamlessly scale to tens of millions of smart devices