BI didn’t ‘do’ IoT
BI tools such as Tableau, Power BI, Lookr and Qlik make it possible to ingest business data from multiple sources (ranging from Excel spreadsheets to vast enterprise data-lakes), then define analyses on that data, and then render them on dashboards. Domo is a fairly recent newcomer to the pack and ranks in the top 20 BI tools globally.
Most BI tools have some kind of story about how they work with IoT, but customers with connected devices rapidly find that this is really just a story, as in fact a notable deficiency of all BI tools to date is how poorly they cope with IoT data. They were originally built for a world of fairly static, business data, rather than the high-volume streaming data which IoT devices produce.
...until now
While Domo has always prided itself on its ability to connect to almost any data source, via more than 1000 ‘connectors’, historically these were all classic business sources such as databases. Now though, Domo has announced a new set of connectors which can ingest data from streaming IoT data sources.
The new IoT-friendly integration sources Domo supports are a mixture of cloud endpoints (including AWS IoT core) and device clouds (Particle). Domo IoT Cloud comes pre-configured with four custom “apps” to cover common use-cases:
- Movement
- Shop Floor Devices
- Consumer Devices
- Predictive Inventory Management
Domo doesn’t just do analytics, it can also do Alerting and “write-back” to the device (just like DevicePilot can), and so you can build not just dashboards, but complete business processes.
Why does this matter?
As IoT becomes increasingly ubiquitous and mainstream, the boundary between IoT and everything-else continues to fade away, and so it becomes more and more reasonable for anyone using a BI tool to expect it to cope with IoT data. This announcement by Domo therefore seems significant as the “starting-gun” in a race for all BI tools to support IoT data well. So it will be very interesting to see how Tableau, Lookr, Qlik and the rest respond.
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