Building a Platform for Digital Transformation
Paze Industries was founded in 2016 with the goal of providing medium-sized mechanical engineering companies with a tool for digital transformation. The Paze IoT digital platform provides customers in various industries ranging from machine manufacturing to automotive or medical technology with a competitive edge. The platform makes machine and process data easy to access and manipulate, giving engineering, production and customer support departments the insights they need for data-driven decision making.
"It’s hard to measure the impact of our partnership with HiveMQ, since the Paze Industries IoT platform, which uses the HiveMQ broker, is our main product," said Wolff. "All of our revenue can be traced back to this application and we currently connect 1500+ devices, some up to 100 million data points per month."
Since most companies in the target market tend to lack expertise with OT, IT or IoT, the Paze Industries platform was designed to be extremely easy to deploy - requiring no code or IT skills to implement IoT use cases. As a result, Paze aims to seamlessly handle the collection of data from machines in the field, then sending the data to a central cloud infrastructure.
We believe our core customers do not have the time or expertise to be consumed with technical details such as whether to use MQTT, OPC UA, or other considerations in collecting and making use of IoT data.
As a result, Paze Industries wanted to build their digital platform with a built-in data broker that is installed once, highly scalable and provides outstanding operational stability to collect data from machines and transmit it securely and reliably to the cloud.
Building the Data Movement Piece of the Puzzle
Security and reliability were the two most important design parameters as Paze Industries developed the data movement piece of their digital platform. The broker itself needed to have various mechanisms to ensure data security on one hand and to guarantee data delivery on the other. Paze Industries not only needed to provide this level of security and reliability on the edge and device side, but also for the communication path to the cloud.
Some of the machines the platform would need to connect to were located in areas with very poor network connections, equipped with little compute power and hardly any network bandwidth. As Paze Industries searched for a solution that could overcome these challenges and satisfy the demands for security and reliability, they quickly identified the MQTT protocol as the best option for the underlying technology to move data.
MQTT seemed predestined for the challenges we were trying to solve,.
First Paze Industires experimented with both the Mosquitto and RabbitMQ MQTT brokers to lay this foundation for data movement. While the former offered a very quick start and was well suited for prototyping, it quickly became clear that the lack of clustering capabilities in particular was a non-starter in order to meet the high availability requirements. RabbitMQ with MQTT plugin was the second technology evaluated, which proved to be cumbersome.
HiveMQ was discovered as an enterprise-grade MQTT platform that offered all of the necessary requirements including security, reliability through a clustered design to backup all IoT messaging, and the ability to develop custom plugins.
HiveMQ met our key technical requirements,” said Wolff. “Then, it turned out to be pretty easy to deploy, which was a welcome surprise. The HiveMQ MQTT broker seemed like the right choice from the first moment and felt enterprise-ready.
HiveMQ was set up very quickly via Docker and the first load tests showed that HiveMQ could easily support the application and that the clustering was surprisingly easy and reliable. Since Paze Industries is cloud-agnostic, one of the advantages to HiveMQ over integrated solutions like Azure IoT Hub, for instance, is the whole stack could be deployed anywhere. Paze Industries chose HiveMQ because it was simple to set up, stable even at high loads, secure, and priced right for the startup.
Up and Running with a Digital Transformation Platform
HiveMQ was installed just a few short months before the entire Paze Industries platform went live and was validated and approved in a short timeframe. The solution operated reliably from day one in a cluster with a custom plugin to send the data to TimescaleDB. “The best part about launching a startup platform with a clustered environment is that we are now future-proof for any amount of growth with HiveMQ,” said Wolff.
The Paze Industries Industrial IoT platform has now been running stably for six years and converts several terabytes of data. HiveMQ has remained extremely stable.
HiveMQ is undoubtedly an excellent MQTT broker that contributes significantly to the stability and security of the Paze Industries platform,” said Wolff. “Starting with excellent documentation, to high operational stability and an enterprise-ready experience, HiveMQ has exceeded our expectations.
