Bright Wolf is a cash-flow positive, experienced boutique provider of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. Founded in 2009 by James Branigan and Patrick Dempsey, Bright Wolf has 60+ customers, with national and international deployments, across healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, consumer and other markets.

Unlike other larger IoT analytics technology providers, Bright Wolf focuses exclusively on IoT. Their customers typically require highly customized and sophisticated solutions and need deep experience with machine data acquisition and remote control. To meet those requirements, the Bright Wolf team provides a combination of development services, a design for change and longevity philosophy and a platform of service modules that can be assembled, configured or augmented with use-specific alternatives as needed.  

Bright Wolf’s IoT platform is a modular suite of services created with Java and loosely coupled via RESTful interfaces. Their platform to can be embedded into smart devices as well as located on-prem and in the cloud, allowing for edge-based analytics and support for both 2 tier (device->on-prem/cloud) and 3 tier (device->gateway->on-prem/cloud) deployment models. Because of the platform’s high-level architecture, Bright Wolf plugs into many of the commonly found IoT messaging protocols such as CoAP, MQTT and HTTPS. Protocols for which connectors do not exist gain support through additional project-specific development.  Many of the core code modules are shared across all tiers to simplify the architecture and improve reliability (e.g. communications, security, configuration, foreign language support, etc.). See Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Bright Wolf  Platform

At the device level, the platform supports various local device network protocols including SAE J1939 (an automotive bus specification), NMEA GPS (a marine electronics spec), Modbus (a SCADA spec), RFID, and GPIO. Data security is fine-grained, with configurable role based security and pluggable authentication and authorization systems. Encryption can be tuned at the per data point level. The platform’s core can be deployed across multiple processors and operating systems as needed for gateways/on-premises installation or device installation.

Bright Wolf user interface and front-end services will be extended in their next release to augment off-the-shelf presentation, controls and analytics capabilities. Data processing leverages a Semantic Web, RDF model that represents the device network, its attributes and nodal relationships. Analytics are handled through various libraries and custom code. 

Particular areas of ability for the platform include:

• Event storms – unexpected high volumes of pushed data from devices
• Delayed, out of order, data processing due to telecom outages
• Supporting real-time data use when data is intermittent or incomplete
• Fine grain data encryption/decryption tunable to application needs
• Handling unusual delays in control loops with feedback and operation state machines
• Abstracted communications over multiple networks

Unlike applications that only operate within the safe confines of a datacenter, IoT systems may have to function effectively in hostile environments where temperature, humidity, g-forces, power loss, airborne chemicals and particulates and other operational disruptors are common-place. Bright Wolf leverages their experience with these design challenges in each new customer project.

Organizations that seek highly specific and customized IoT solutions and one-stop shopping for both a platform and implementation services should consider Bright Wolf. They will gain personalized service combined with proven technology from the company’s dedicated team.