Particle Announces Particle Cloud — an Enterprise IoT Platform to Help Successfully Launch IoT Products

Today Particle, the most widely-used Internet of Things platform, announced Particle Cloud, its enterprise IoT platform, already being used by Fortune 500 companies to ship secure, reliable, and easy-to-use IoT products in as little as six months.

"The Internet of Things is a new industry with huge potential. However, the unfortunate reality is that many businesses’ IoT initiatives flounder or fail," said Zach Supalla, Particle co-founder and CEO. "The strongest business case for building an IoT product is irrelevant if you can’t execute. Companies who work with Particle actually ship their products."

Typically, building an IoT product takes 18 to 36 months and costs millions of dollars. With Particle, engineers and developers can build their first prototype in an afternoon with an inexpensive hardware development kit ($19), and can move incrementally to pilot hundreds or thousands of units and eventually to a full-scale roll-out of 100 thousand units or more. This model allows product creators and OEMs to iterate quickly and ship a higher-quality product faster.

Companies like Keurig, Briggs Healthcare, and Engie (GDF Suez) have already developed new products that run on Particle Cloud and have delivered those products to customers at scale in as little as six months. In addition, more than 20 Particle-powered products from startups like Grove and CleverPet have been crowdfunded on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, raising millions of dollars to deliver their products.

"We made more progress on our first day with Particle than we had in months without them," said Michael Cunningham, CIO of Keurig, "and within six months we began collecting data from thousands of connected brewers in the hands of consumers."

Particle Cloud provides the necessary infrastructure to connect physical devices to the web and expose their functionality through a secure API, as well as a suite of software development tools and a Device Management Console for managing a "fleet" of connected devices. Enterprise customers can also upgrade to get private cloud deployments, enterprise uptime SLAs, enterprise support contracts, pre-built integrations with popular data management and analytics platforms, access controls and audit logs to track activity in the system, and storage of events and data published by devices.

In order to deliver a complete solution to customers, Particle has partnered with Google, Microsoft, IFTTT, and a number of other data and analytics cloud platforms who help customers generate insights from the massive quantities of data produced by IoT products.

Particle has also partnered with semiconductor companies like Broadcom, Cypress, u-blox, and ST to deliver its hardware solutions, and cellular connectivity providers like Twilio, T-Mobile, and Telefonica to provide networking. Particle’s partner ecosystem also includes more than 50 professional services companies like Lunar Design, Sigma Connectivity, and Jabil who can help customers develop both their physical IoT product and the software applications those devices will communicate with.

Particle became famous for the Spark Core, the Photon and Electron, their hardware development kits for creating IoT prototypes. These "dev kits" rely on Particle Cloud, the company’s IoT PaaS cloud platform. To date, they have shipped more than 120,000 dev kits and built a community of 70,000 software developers and hardware engineers developing new IoT products and solutions with Particle. With a community of more than 70,000 developers, the speed and agility of the Particle platform has been proven on projects large and small, and Particle Cloud makes these products scalable and enterprise-ready.