Founded in 2010, Ayla Networks, is a leading end-to-end platform provider of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) for manufacturers and service providers.
Founded in 2010, Ayla Networks, is a leading end-to-end platform provider of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) for manufacturers and service providers. Ayla’s Agile IoT platform provides the flexibility and modularity to suit for any type of device, cloud or app environment for its B2B customers. The USA is the largest market to the company, followed by China, the second largest market. Seeing the great market potential in China, the company set up a branch office in China with Internet Content Provide (ICP) license.
To Ayla, the home segment has been growing rapidly since 2014 after Google acquired Nest. It was a key driver for those home appliance companies to enter the smart home for adding values to its products.
Seeing social networking as another major driver for IoT, Ayla Networks offers proxy service to manufacturers for fast and easy connection with leading social-media service providers, such as Weixin. Admin tools and application programming interfaces (APIs) are provided to support integration. Philip Chang, co-founder and general manager of Greater China said, “Ayla’s new connected home portal lets users to use the apps offered by the social network service providers to control physical devices in their homes as easily as they now control their virtual activities.“
Manufacturers are major customers
The HAVC segment accounts for the largest share of the company’s revenue, followed by water-related, home security, and lighting products. Its customers are Dimplex, TCL, Ozner, Kidde, Devotion, Regen, Yifang Digital and so on. Chang said smart lighting is projected to the second largest segment over the next few years.
Chang said manufacturers who adopt their platform would like to understand clients’ demand and usage patterns from the data analysis. Chang added that some companies utilize the collected data and the cloud platform to provide consumers convenience. With the third-party GPS-based weather data, the water heater could be set to the right temperature automatically according to the season and climate.
To evaluate the IoT platform, development cost, time-to-market, data usability, and flexibility, according to Chang. Chang said, “when we talk about the cloud platform, we talk about instances.” Regarding its business model, Chang explained, “We don’t charge non-recurring engineering (NRE) expense. We release source code and library to our clients’ app developers. They can upgrade their features for free. We make money from data analytics.“ Chang believes the cloud-centered structure is ideal for smart home control. “It’s costly to use a smartphone as a remote control. A real smart home requires users to solely set up and pre-program the rules and scenarios they want without controlling the devices all the time,” commented Chang.
AMAP speeds mobile control
Ayla’s Agile Mobile Application Platform (AMAP) lets manufacturers of connected products create mobile apps that control their products with ease, getting to market four to six times faster than is possible with alternative approaches. Designed for IoT solutions using the Ayla cloud, AMAP provides the 85 percent of coding and development work common to any high-performing, reliable and secure IoT mobile app, in the form of vertical market-specific workflows. Manufacturers can focus on their core expertise in making and designing their products without worrying complex IoT connectivity work.
The Agile Mobile Application Platform, built upon Ayla’s mobile software libraries, provides pre-made, pre-tested software code that supports the primary features, such as sign-in, user registration, device setup and control, password recovery, Wi-Fi and ZigBee setup, schedule creation and management, support for push notification and timer setup.
It provides a framework on top of the application program interfaces (APIs) and mobile libraries that allow IoT devices to connect to the Ayla cloud and to integrate with iOS or Android code. All AMAP code development is done in native Objective C and Java languages.