CIO Bulletin

Particle – Helping innovative companies in the world reprogram their businesses for the better

Platform as a Service, also known as PaaS, is a valuable cloud/IoT platform that facilitates the development of applications and other forms of software. If your company develops applications internally, PaaS opportunities can be among the best ways to streamline your development projects, no matter the size or scale. Whether you're scaling a revolutionary micromobility fleet, driving efficiencies by tracking the location and status of business-critical assets, or monitoring protected lands for illegal forestry, the promise of IoT is compelling: bring connectivity, intelligence, and control to unconnected physical objects. While the promise of IoT is alluring, the road to IoT nirvana is plagued with challenges ranging from security risks to complexities spanning hardware, connectivity, and software. The IoT-based PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) model provides users applications over the internet. Vendors providing PaaS services offer application developers with a developer environment. The provider develops the standards and tool kits for development, payments and distribution channels. The providers provide a platform for computing, which usually includes an operating system, execution environment for programming languages, web servers, and a database.

That's where Particle comes in. Particle is the edge-to-cloud IoT platform to help you connect the unconnected. With powerful hardware solutions that thrive at the edge, reliable and efficient connectivity technologies, and software to manage your IoT deployment, Particle empowers you to unlock the promise of IoT. Particle provides an integrated IoT Platform-as-a-Service that helps businesses connect, manage, and deploy software applications to connected devices, from edge to cloud and back. Over 240k developers and 160+ Enterprise customers are building on Particle, from fast-growing startups to Fortune 100 companies. Its expertise goes beyond world-class technology, enabling next-generation business intelligence, insights, and expert customer support to make sure IoT projects succeed. So you can reprogram your business, industry, and the world.

Powering Connected Solutions to Business Problems

Integrated IoT Platform-as-a-Service: Particle offers powerful software to develop and manage applications. It is durable, secure hardware pre-provisioned with a stable operating system. It’s all built to work together so you can start as soon as you turn your devices on. Particle brings the flexibility and extensibility of building IoT yourself and the dependability of using an off-the-shelf solution together into one PaaS. They handle the hard things that don’t differentiate you, so you can focus on the essential things that do. Everything you need to reliably and securely update your firmware comes pre-integrated. No set up required. Particle customers push over 100,000 OTA updates a month, and the majority finish in less than 30 seconds. Fully integrated connectivity diagnostics let you monitor your devices by region, carrier, partner and radio access technology, so you always know the source of an outage. Their global support and reliability team are constantly monitoring each layer of their infrastructure, so you know you’re always protected from unexpected outages. All the data that flows from your devices to your cloud and back is protected with industry-leading security. Protect your customers’ and business’ data confidently.

Device OS: It is an operating system that runs on all Particle devices and connects to the Particle cloud. It abstracts hardware and connectivity away to make it easy to write powerful edge software applications. It offers low-Level Hardware Interactions so you can have a single unified interface to your devices, regardless of the underlying hardware architecture. It also provides security and reliability so all your communications are encrypted from device to cloud, each device has its own private key, and your fleet is protected from unauthorized hardware. Users can develop differentiated software application with an easy-to-use programming framework and out-of-the-box firmware, including power, data, and connectivity management. Sending and receiving business-critical data to and from your devices with Particle primitives will let you run code, read values, and send/receive events with single commands.

Particle Connectivity: Access up-to-date diagnostics on device responsiveness, SIM card status, cellular signals, battery life, and more. Detect cellular outages by region, carrier, partner, and radio access technology with real-time proactive alerts and notifications. Get technical support on migrating to connectivity options to ensure your products have a longer lifespan. Particle offers secure, integrated, and reliable connectivity that solves the hidden challenges of device-to-cloud communication, scalability, and networking for you. Particle uses best-in-class technologies and hardware components integrated into one seamless, scalable and secure platform. Connect your devices in the best way for your use case, whether it's cellular (LTE CAT M1, LTE CAT1), or 2.4 and 5 GHz WiFi. All Particle connectivity management and data services are pre-integrated, enabling you to scale and manage your IoT deployments worry-free. Get access to all premium pre-integrated services like SIM management, multi-path networking support, IP navigation, connectivity health logging, 24/7 incident management, and long-term support guarantees from day 1. Gain immediate access to tier 1 operators without multiple contracts and billing relationships. All Particle devices automatically connect to the best available network across 350 carriers around the world. Particle Connectivity supports remote profile updates and automatically gets access to new carriers that are added to their MVNO.

Particle Device Cloud: It provides a scalable and secure data pipeline and device management interface. Gain deeper insights into your physical assets by extracting data relevant to your business using Particle’s unique data and device management capabilities. Particle Cloud is built to work seamlessly with the rest of the Particle Platform-as-a-Service. Particle Cloud supports off-platform integrations with all of the major third parties in the IoT space with one-click setup. It supports integration with any REST API, enabling you to integrate with most other third-party systems. Use cloud-side business rules to send commands and process, analyze, and easily store raw data published from an IoT fleet. Create dashboards that bring IoT data to life using charts and graphs and route critical alerts straight to your business apps when important events happen in the physical world. Leverage Platform's tracking services to easily store and retrieve geolocation data to and from their cloud for configurable mapping, and reporting services. Create automatic reports based on the data you have collected and use it improve business decision-making.

Supply Secure: The customers need to focus on what they do best: building and delivering market-leading products, on a predictable timeline. Particle manages a portfolio of interchangeable components tested and pre-certified by their engineering team and sourced from their diverse network of suppliers. Their customers have confidence in their supply because they trust Particle to manage the complexity of an agile, risk-averse supply chain. Supply Secure components are backed by a contractual Service Level Agreement (SLA) so that the customers can rest assured that they are partnering with them to navigate any disruption or delay. Supply Secure modules will require minimal hardware and firmware changes to migrate from existing products. The Particle engineering team takes care of testing, APIs, and certification so that the customers have minimal change-management and redesign impact to their production process. Each new component will include clear communication on migration paths, “last order” date notifications, as well as delivery dates for prototyping samples and production volume.

The Ardent Visionary

Zach Supalla is the Chief Executive Officer of Particle. Driven to make a difference in the world, Zach started this company because his dad was deaf and he wanted to create a connected light that flashed whenever his father received a text message. This started Zach on a journey to ask, "What if we could reprogram lights to make our lives easier?" And second, "What if everything could be reprogrammed to make our lives easier?" Today, that’s precisely what Particle does.

Mr. Supalla earned an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and an MEM (masters in engineering management) from the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern. Before Particle, Supalla worked as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, advising Fortune 500 companies on strategy, operations and product development. He is a graduate of HAX, the world's first and most prolific hardware accelerator.