MSMEs and IoT

Industrialization is a key to economic development of any country. Micro, Small and Medium enterprises (MSMEs) have played an imperative role in economic development of highly industrialized countries as well as the developing ones.

MSMEs are considered the backbone of the national economy due to their versatile contributions in terms of employment generation, export promotion and removal of regional imbalance. And for the MSMEs, technology is the backbone!

Today, the Internet of Things, or IoT, is that technology which has provided a new direction to growth for the MSMEs. It’s growing at a breakneck pace, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. Cost is an important parameter for MSMEs. Technology helps in reducing cost to a great extent. IoT presents opportunities like remote monitoring, proactive maintenance, reduced communication efforts and cost. Thus, resulting in reduced overall operations cost. Trained and skilled labor is a very costly and scarce resource to MSME. IoT driven and automed solutions can reduce dependency of skilled labor in significant proportion.

The IoT represents a huge opportunity for businesses of all sizes. It isn’t just big enterprises that are making extensive use of this network of sensors and devices. MSMEs have already hopped into the action. They have already begun to scratch the surface of what IoT technologies can do for their business.

Adding valuable contribution to this sector, AFour has been providing end-to-end IoT solutions to empower smart industries, smart living and smart enterprises and deliver connected experiences by connecting assets, operations/logistics, and services.

While we have expertise across all stages of IoT adoption to provide MSMEs with a seamless experience to their maximize efficiency, we focus predominantly on the segments mentioned below:

Our Offerings

UI/UX Design: With sound expertise and wide exposure in end-to-end design of different digital products – Web Apps / SaaS, Mobile Apps, e-Commerce portals and a lot more, AFour has been creating  user friendly and highly intuitive UX designs. Our UX design brings together the best of both worlds – a fierce focus on design principles as well as a seamless functionality.

Architectural design & development: With our vast experience we have helped clients build technology products, healthcare, eCommerce, educational software applications, software industry 4.0, mobile, web 2.0, embedded software, and business-driven enterprise applications. During the stage of software architectural analysis, we emphasize on various key aspects including Business Architecture, Application Architecture, Data Architecture and Technical Architecture. Understanding this helps us in building the core of the system in terms of functionality and cost keeping in mind security, availability and scalability features.

DevOps, SysOps, DBOps, CloudOps, FinOps: AFour has excellent DevOps culture. Teams are trained to use DevOps seamlessly as a part of product engineering cycles. DevOps is used in the areas of Infrastructure provisioning, Configuration Management and while building CI / CD pipelines. Our teams also help customers in SysOps activities like migration and upgrades and other support (RIM support). Engineering as well as production databases are managed remotely by AFour DBAs. Most of the products have cloud integration  to help meet business goals more efficiently, and adopt cloud native practices. AFour team has excellent skills in wide range of cloud platforms like Azure, AWS, Google, and OpenStack. FinOps is a very important area as a part of DevOps services where teams monitor client resources and recommend on releasing or optimization of cloud resources while monitoring assets with right cost and resource optimization.

Backend Development: As a product engineering company AFour adds value as a technology house and ensure that customer has most of the focus on the business side. We have a strong team of backend developers in the wide range of technologies like Python, C#.NET, Javascript (Node.js), Java, Scala. The teams work with architects in building distributed backend, middleware components of enterprise scale products. We leverage architectural patterns of Microservices, Asynchronous messaging, SQL / NoSQL and also build extensive complex and efficient data engineering pipelines to gather data which can help in providing meaningful insights to the customer.

Test Automation: AFour’s Test Automation services encompasses offerings ranging from automation strategy to automation of regression test suites. Our test automation experts have experience in identifying the right test case for automation, based on the stage of SDLC deciding the timing of automation, selecting the right tools and optimal set of frameworks which will yield the best ROI.

Performance Engineering & Testing: We at AFour are well equipped with a team of experienced performance engineers who have a deep knowledge of various use-case-specific technology stacks, computer alternatives and middleware platforms. Our aim is to help in designing software as well as deployment architecture in building high available, scalable, maintainable distributed enterprise software applications.  To verify scalability AFour team performs stress testing at the component level as well as application level and extensive load testing at application level. AFour also contributes towards resolving scalability / availability issues in the system.

Security Engineering & Testing: AFour aims at 3 basic principles to protect information systems from being compromised by adversaries: Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Security experts at AFour Technologies are well versed at employing Static Application Security Techniques (SAST) and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) techniques to discover potential threats that can be targeted by malicious users. Our security engineering and testing covers the entire ecosystem of network, host, application and data. Team identifies potential vulnerabilities in our clients’ applications or products and help them safeguard their applications, critical database and business logic. To address software vulnerabilities, AFour offers a plethora of highly reliable security services to clients using technologies like: OWASP Top 10, SANS Top 25, PCI-DSS, HIPAA.

Data Engineering: As a Product Engineering company AFour has worked on several Data and AI/ML projects, we have a rich understanding of the domain. AFours offers a holistic approach to data engineering and analytics that covers all the technical drivers required to fully capitalize on enterprise data resources. AFour’s team has hands-on experience with the leading Data Engineering tools, technologies and frameworks like Python, Apache Spark, Scala, Kafka, SQL / NoSQL databases  and many more. Along with this AFour teams also are skilled with wide range of visualization tools like Power BI, RStudio, Tableau. AFours stands out with a proven process to capitalize on enterprise data, reduce deployment risks and accelerate time to market.

Web & App Development: AFourTech’s Software Developers have a rich experience of working in diverse domains of web development as well as the underlying Operating Systems and platforms. We have a deep knowledge in end-to-end web & App development. Our Agile software development (RAD) approach follows the Agile SDLC to a tee – with each sprint adding value to the end-product. Equipped with the required SDK tools and trained personnel, we leave no loose strings while delivering excellence.

Field IoT Network Design and Development: AFour teams are equipped to design and develop field networking components for IoT platform which include controllers, gateways, network configurations, etc. AFour partners with hardware vendor in designing and developing hardware components and integrates them with software solutions. AFour has implemented networking configurations using wide range of network protocols such as Bluetooth, Wifi, Zigbee, LoRa and used different types of data protocols to send data to Cloud / IoT gateway such as MQTT, HTTP. AFour team also has built own solutions for edge computing which is important in IoT to send optimal data to the internet and provide immediate feedback / action based on local data.

Building / Integrating to IoT Platform: Data once gathered from the field, it is important to store that data in a location which is available for required analysis. Typically location which is available over the internet is used since the data can be accessed easily from anywhere. All leading cloud providers have their own IoT platforms which can be used for this purpose. Or one can build own platform to ingest large amounts of data (e.g. up to millions of records per day) and store it without any loss of data points. AFour teams have wide experience in both types of solutions. They have exposure to IoT platforms of all leading providers (e.g. Azure, Intel, Dell Emc, IBM, etc.) and can build own customized, lightweight, and cost effective IoT platform from scratch using public or private cloud infrastructure.