Summary Bullets:

• German-based enterprise software vendor Software AG held an innovative virtual product release event on October 10th, which focused on new capabilities across its portfolio.

• Of particular interest were new capabilities of its IoT platform, Cumulocity IoT, which are aligned with the industry, as vendors seek to move up from connectivity management to edge computing, application enablement, and advanced analytics.

Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT platform, acquired by the software vendor in March 2017, has maintained its solid reputation for connectivity and device management. It is sold directly to enterprises but is also provided to businesses through reseller agreements with operators such as Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica, value-added reseller Tieto, and Siemens, the latter of which uses it for the device connectivity element of its Mindsphere solution. But while the platform gets good technical reviews, it has often been relegated to “also-ran” status when compared to competing platforms from the likes of enterprise heavy-hitters SAP, IBM, and Microsoft, industrial expert PTC, and hyperscale cloud services providers Google and AWS.

But Cumulocity is coming up the curve. While often viewed as lacking capabilities at the higher-level layers necessary for an end to end IoT platform, such as sophisticated data handling, application enablement, and data analytics, its integrations with parent Software AG’s other products and services have added features and functions that add to its value. It has 170+ pre-built connectors to leading clouds and application providers including SAP, AWS S3, Salesforce, ServiceNow, MS Dynamics, Zendesk, and Zuora. It can also extend the platform in order to do custom integrations, extend to third-party analytics engines, and connect to backend applications and server-side agents using the Microservice SDK. Cumulocity differentiates itself through the ability to get customers started quickly, with over 100 plug and play certified devices and gateways and over 300 supported protocols out of the box. The platform has expanded into edge solutions with “thin-edge” and “thick-edge” solutions for on-premises gateways and servers.

New capabilities announced at the event include: easy to use, configuration-driven support for the LWM2M protocol, integration with standard device management processes, integration of SAG’s streaming analytics engine Apama, as well as integration with self-service time-series data analytics tool TrendMiner, also acquired by SAG in 2018. Cumulocity is also planning to release an analytics builder, as a co-innovation project with customer DURR in 2019. This will help out businesses with few coding resources, such as OT line-of-business users, with a drag and drop, web-based user interface. Cumulocity will also be running Zementis (the ML/AI-empowered predictive analytics application acquired by SAG in 2016) as a tenant microservice in early 2019, for a machine learning workbench with one click deployment of ML pipelines.

Businesses may find Cumulocity a good solution for a wide variety of IoT requirements, with parent Software AG behind the scenes to provide integration, consulting and support options. It still lags some of the U.S.-based powerhouses in its brand power, global reach, built-in integration with core business applications, and depth of vertical solutions but it is definitely making its way up the stack.