WideSky Hub achieves Thread Group accreditation

Brisbane – April 29, 2020 – Mature startup WideSky.Cloud Pty Ltd is the first end product developer in the C&I (Commercial and Industrial) market outside of Google subsidiary NEST, to be awarded the Built on Thread certification. Computer chip manufacturers are the other main category.

The Thread Group made the announcement on Monday.

The WideSky family of products has been developed over the last eight years or so to meet the emerging requirements for IoT solutions: large scale, fast, reliable and secure monitoring and control over the internet. The WideSky Hub plays it’s part at the data collector and control actuator end of the systems.
The WideSky Hub seamlessly connects your sensors to the WideSky Cloud IoT data platform and controls your actuators from anywhere, subject to RBAC permissions.

Its onboard serial communications and I/O interfaces enable a broad range of traditional non-IP devices to be Thread networked with banking-class public-key cryptography. Built-in data logging and auto back-fill capabilities provide additional protection against loss of valuable field data. WideSky Hubs are centrally configured from WideSky Cloud and support OTA firmware updates. They are well suited to solutions such as Energy Management, smart buildings and factory automation. Product Link.

WideSky Hubs have been deployed in a variety of markets to date including, energy management for buildings, billing metering, government, high-density residential, lifestyle living and marinas. They have also proved particularly useful in facility retrofit situations where cabling solutions would have been expensive or otherwise problematic.

Google has managed to position its Thread Group in a leadership position in the race for interoperability standards. Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance also recently announced Project CHIP (“Commercial and Home over IP”) which aims to create a unified standard for the communication of smart devices. CHIP will initially focus on using Thread. This certification now places the WideSky Hub in that mix and is currently the only industrial-grade product that can integrate industrial controllers into this ecosystem.

WideSky CEO John Meehan says “I’m very proud of the small but highly talented WideSky development team that has developed several industry-leading IoT products, including the WideSky Hub. They have every right to be pleased with themselves.”

WideSky CTO, Patrick Coffey, who managed the certification submission process also pays tribute to the engineers from WideSky’s implementation partner VRT Systems who put considerable effort into extensive field trials and stress testing.

Coffey says “anything related to wireless communications can be tricky. We all learned enormously from the field trials. Our industrial environments often contain large steel structures and powerful outdoor WiFi routers and cell towers. We’ve built a significant knowledge bank of information, for example, antennae options that enable this very clever Thread technology to work reliably in the real world.”

About WideSky

WideSky is an Australian company delivering IoT solutions for the energy, buildings and industry sectors. It evolved from VRT Systems, a business with over 30 years of experience in delivering industrial information solutions. WideSky offers a wide range of IoT solutions to customers throughout Australia.

Through our partner network, we are now able to deliver at scale around the world.

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