What's an appliance?
Think of it as a CRM customized to your business to replace old Excel sheets. You use a pre-configured application with a structuration of your customers data and some workflows to automatically take actions.
In the case of appliances, we are not dealing with customers but equipment producing data like metering or controllers for boilers, chilled water plants, lights, all interacting together.
The principle of an appliance is to model the behavior of these devices, create workflows to automate their integration and to deal with their data.
Quicker deployment
Usually a System Integrator would integrate each equipment in an automation system one by one, do the logic and create some views more or less manually.
An appliance will allows external users to do all of it with a simple interface (graphical or through APIs).
The 4 steps to create appliances
We Model your domain data
Based on your knowledge and your domain specifics, we create data models to represent your domain and structure acquired data relatively to the models.
For a data center appliance for example, mutualized rooms and customers rooms will be described as well as front and rear door positions for a sensor.
We create assets libraries
To allow a non System Integrator to add new equipment to its system, we create pre-configured library of equipment, users, permissions
For a metering appliance, a library of installed meters is created so a simple drag&drop is needed to add a new device on the system.
We automate deployment
Once we have data models and assets libraries we can create workflows to automate the deployment and create all the interactions.
For a commercial building appliance for example, a view on each equipment will be generated as well as a status synthesis.
We create interactions with third party systems
An appliance is rarely on its own and needs usually to share/collect data with third party systems. We can automatically create the synchronizations with other systems.
In a school appliance for example, schedules are synchronized from the booking timetables application and classroom occupancy is sent back to the application.
Examples
Some examples of Appliances
