Affordable dashboard tool, a must-have for larger companies!
Rating: 9 out of 10
February 01, 2019
FP
Vetted Review
Verified User
2 years of experience
We use IBM Watson IoT as a centralized service for connecting our sensors, service transceivers, and backend in the development stage of deployment. Watson IoT helps us integrate data analytics, basic machine learning, and manage security for a selection of IoT devices from a centralized service. It has helped us significantly speed up our deployment of some hardware products, and avoid "re-inventing the wheel" during development.
- Centralized dashboard - Having a centralized dashboard for all IoT devices is super helpful and greatly decreases the overhead for this type of development.
- Super easy to integrate - The UI, documentation, and tutorials are extensive and well-designed, so getting the entire system up and running is quite easy.
- Extensive integrations and compability - Watson IoT has extensive compatability with devices and data types, making it easy to integrate an entire IoT ecosystem.
Cons
- Some of the tutorials could use a little more improvement - While there is a considerable amount of documentation, most of the good documentation for Watson IoT we found to be from third-parties.
- Administration and billing tools could use a bit more improvement - The UI is a bit clunky and poorly-designed here.
- Be prepared to work with IBM support to get this going - Their turn-around support for inquiries can be lengthy, and setup time may also be quite lengthy because of this.
- Positive - This tool greatly increases most company's manufacturing and production efficiency, and the use-cases are extensive. It was a great way of decreasing down-time for us.
- Negative - Took lots of work and energy to get up and running, we had to rely on IBM support and tutorials many times during this process.
- Positive - Quite cheap, most of the tiers of pricing cost very little, and it's possible to use Watson IoT for a few months for free to see if it is beneficial for your company.
AWS offers an "IoT" product that similarly connects devices securely to centralize data exchange, predict downtime, and overall increase the efficiency of an IoT infrastructure. Like some of the other AWS products, the documentation is lacking and UI is quite hard to use, which is why we chose to use IBM Watson instead.