Tibbo Systems, the Leading IoT Software Developer, Stands Tall Among Competition

We develop, deploy and service solutions based on AggreGate IoT Platform: Victor Polyakov

A patient with heart disease who has been instructed to weigh himself daily on a smart scale gets a call from his physician’s office. The call is a preventative check-in, triggered by the patient’s recent, sharp weight gain — which, for people with heart disease, can be a sign of congestive heart failure.

This is an example of the Internet of Things (IoT), where devices collect, sense and analyze data to trigger actions defined by business goals. The IoT can transform core business processes (and in this instance, prevent an acute medical emergency or even save a life). It’s paved the way for new business models in areas including predictive maintenance, connected vehicles and smart appliances.

Tibbo Systems specializes in control and monitoring software. It takes care of developing AggreGate Platform, as well as all vertical market products based on it.

AggreGate is an IoT integration platform that enables quick solution for five aims of any IoT application: data acquisition, storage, processing, visualization and enterprise application integration.

The company was incorporated in 2001 and is headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan.

Victor Polyakov, Tibbo Systems Managing Director, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Why was the company set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

In the beginning of the century, Tibbo was a leading player in Serial-over-IP hardware market. We’ve been selling both external device servers and embedded modules. The very first version of our AggreGate platform was just routing data between device servers located in private networks protected by firewalls.

At some point, our devices became programmable, so we’ve started to instruct our platform how to ‘understand’ device data, as well as keep, transform and visualize it. This was the practical launch of current IoT platform that took place much earlier than the IoT term itself got into wide use.

Since then, we’re constantly improving the platform’s toolset comprising abstract data acquisition, storage, processing and visualization instruments. However, in contrast to the competition, we’re also providing out-of-the-box products competing in specific narrow markets, such as SCADA and IT Infrastructure Management system.

What kind of responses have you received from your consumers over the years? How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?

We serve all vertical markets and deliver solutions for cases that often have antipodal system requirements. That’s why we implement every feature at a very high level of abstraction.

Despite our usability efforts, small customers sometimes criticize the platform for excessive flexibility and long learning curve. This pays back by positive reviews from large system integrators and corporations who get an umbrella solution for building a digital enterprise.

About adaptability, how do you stay relevant to the consumer interests and needs in this high volatile market?

We’re not pretending to re-invent the wheel for every narrow niche market. The key advantage of our vertical products is the base platform itself. It makes them flexible enough to suit customization and integration requirements of large companies.

At the same time, we collect requirements from a huge set of very differing markets and plan our evolution to cover them all. This broad vision also helps us to detect market trends, foresee future requirements and deliver new products and features in advance.

Products Based on AggreGate Platform

IoT Integration Platform: AggreGate IoT Integration Platform enables acquisition, storage, processing, and visualization of M2M device data, as well as integration of this data into the enterprise. In contrast to other solutions providing underlying infrastructure and SDKs for vertical application development, AggreGate ensures end-to-end coverage by offering visual development tools for designing end-user UIs and server-side processing chains.

The vendor-agnostic Platform includes hundreds of device drivers enabling connection of any industrial or consumer IoT device, all communications are optimized for unreliable low-bandwidth cellular and satellite communications.

IT Management and Network Monitoring: AggreGate Network Manager is an enterprise IT infrastructure management and monitoring system. It is designed for data center management, monitoring network traffic and performance, bandwidth usage, routers and servers, applications and services, network-enabled sensors, printers monitoring, etc.

Monitoring is performed using standard protocols, such as SNMP or WMI. AggreGate Network Manager has outstanding support for non-standard network equipment and integration with other building/facility management systems.

Data Center Management: AggreGate Data Center Supervisor is a single umbrella system for supervising both industrial and IT equipment of your data center. It offers dynamic floor plans, custom dashboards, integration with DCIM, and more.

The Data Center Supervisor joins all features available in AggreGate Network Manager and AggreGate SCADA/HMI, making it a product with the broadest coverage for IT, telecom, data center and industrial control technologies and protocols.

Industrial Automation and SCADA/HMI: AggreGate SCADA/HMI is a new-gen SCADA system for industrial and building automation, process control, telemetry, and designing custom Human-Machine Interfaces.

Drivers for most industry-standard protocols, such as Modbus and OPC, allow connect and communicate with controllers and devices from thousands of different manufacturers.

Building Automation: AggreGate Building Automation is a solution for creating a "smart" building. Use AggreGate’s intelligent features, such as automated responses to certain alert conditions, to make your building smarter and greener than ever.

Control HVAC levels and time of operation, electric window shades, water heating facilities, outside lighting and any other aspect of your building using AggreGate’s intuitive widgets. Get a clear

overview of your building at a glance with AggreGate’s dashboard and produce detailed energy consumption reports.

Time and Attendance: AggreGate Time and Attendance is a corporate employees' time and attendance management solution. It collects data from different types of time recorders and provides organization structure management, support for custom shifts, real-time event logging and integration with payroll systems.

AggreGate Time and Attendance solution includes a rich set of customizable out-of-the-box attendance reports adoptable for different country standards.

Security and Access Control: AggreGate Access Control is a comprehensive system for controlling physical access within an office building or a campus. It features natural cardholder hierarchy, flexible time zones and access policies, anti-passback, guard tours, area presence, and more.

AggreGate Access Control can intercommunicate with access control panels, turnstiles, elevator controllers, electric door buzzers, pressure sensors and other types of equipment. AggreGate’s inherent event management abilities provide a detailed audit trail of all security events.

Automatic Meter Reading: AggreGate Meter Reading collects readings from water, gas, heat, and electric meters. Playing the role of Meter Data Management (MDM) software, it stores meterings in the central database and shares them for billing, troubleshooting and reporting.

The system communicates with meters via diverse communication protocols (Modbus, Meter-Bus, DLMS/COSEM, OPC, SNMP, etc.). It perfectly understands M2M meters that connect to the server via incoming cellular links. AggreGate’s data processing and visualization tools allow setting up a highly tailored metering value analysis process.

Fleet Manager: AggreGate Fleet Manager is a vehicle management system designed for controlling a fleet of cars, trucks, vessels, forklifts or other vehicles. It provides outstanding coverage for tracking asset location as well as centralized collection, storage, processing and visualization of diverse telemetry data.

The Fleet Manager supports many GPS/GLONASS trackers out-of-the-box while support for new tracker types can be added without programming by setting up communication settings and command parsing rules. Flexible fleet mapping UI designer helps combining GIS-neutral maps with custom device control toolbars.

How does your company contribute to the competitive global IT platform at large?

We have a mature technology alliance program targeting certification of device vendors, communication service providers and industry-specific analytical solution providers.

Open nature of our platform and its numerous extension points help us to jointly cover large-scale initiatives in smart cities, smart energy and other domains.

Do you have any new products ready to be launched?

This year we’re launching a large product allowing telecoms and MSPs to build a PaaS infrastructure and IoT services in their network and cloud, as well as develop and maintain an ecosystem of technology partners.

Other coming product launches are related to physical security information management, data orchestration and IoT business intelligence.

As a question on sustainability, where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

Our strategic plan assumes we’ll get publicly listed in a couple of years. We scale our processes to keep up with the high CAGR that we’re coping with since 2010.

Victor Polyakov: A Promising Leader

Victor Polyakov is the Managing Director for the AggreGate IoT Integration Platform in Tibbo Systems. This project changed the company’s description over time from Device Management Platform to M2M Platform and, later, to IoT Platform.

Since Victor is playing a key role in the AggreGate Platform evolution, he is taking part in system architecture design and establishing long-term partnerships with OEMs and System Integrators playing in IoT, Network Management, Industrial Automation, DCIM, Vehicle Tracking, and other grounds.

Mr. Polyakov graduated from Tver State Technical University in 2002. While university years provided Victor initial experience in Industrial Automation area, first years of professional career in Tibbo were shared with Network Operating Center engineer duties in a local telco company TeleNET.

“The key advantage of our vertical products is the base platform itself. It makes them flexible enough to suit customization and integration requirements of large companies.”