It was incredibly difficult to select a topic for our very first episode of The Connected Integrated Show because there is so much to cover at the intersection of IT, OT and Telecommunications. But it seems that the zeitgeist presented the obvious choice with the release of a poignant docudrama called Mr Bates vs The Office. We are going to talk about a very British IT Scandal, an egregious miscarriage of justice and a total failure to transform a complex system which on one hand was meant to enable a retail business and on the other was supposed to strengthen a public service.

For my generation, born in the 1970s, growing up during the 1980s years of the “home computer revolution” and finishing high school/starting our careers at the very beginning of the commercial Internet age, this whole IT Scandal brings back memories of a different era when public services were very much delivered directly by government departments, agencies and (sometimes) corporations. The mass privatization of state assets was a 1990s feature, something which gained momentum in the aftermath of the 1990-1991 global recession (rising inflation, the aftermath of banking crisis like the savings and loans collapse, not to mention the first Gulf War). Governments were eager to find ways of boosting the public treasury and move some spending “off balance sheet”. The UK was no different and some public services programs became candidates for a curious instrument known as a “Private Finance Initiative”.

It is within this context that the UK Government wished to tighten up public spending, promote more private sector business involvement in the economy and in general toughen up rules for access to welfare benefits. And the one institution at the epicenter of all of this was the Post Office, because of its role in distributing benefits payments (everything from state pensions to childcare allowances) to individual residents. Up until the introduction of the Horizon IT System, this distribution channel was paper based and relied on human to human trust to ensure that benefits were allocated to the right person. For example a Subpostmaster in a small village would typically know the people in his or her community and would verify the identity of the person. In larger towns and cities this would work provided the branch Post Office was in close proximity to residents. It seems to me that this whole concept of human to human trust was completely overlooked by UK Government zeal to automate and digitize their welfare retail channel.

Given the politics involved in driving such a massive transformation agenda it is no surprise that the consensus between government departments broke down, with divergent agendas (especially within the Department of Social Security and the Benefits Agency which placed them at opposition to the UK Post Office) questioning the original motivation. And yet the program continued and assumptions were maintained in the high level strategy, especially for the UK Post Office. This all placed severe strain on the private sector contractor, at the time ICL Pathway (later to become Fujitsu Services).

There’s an important lesson here, especially as we start 2024 (25 years after the Horizon go-live). We tend to place great faith in technology solutions as a cure-all for malaise in society. But we forget that the breakdown in trust is not a result of a lack of technology implementation but rather a breakdown in our human to human interactions. I find it ironic that theme for this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos is “Rebuilding Trust” (yes that link to Fujitsu’s web site was deliberate!).

In the wild rush to embrace AI, digital currencies and digital identity schemes it would serve us well to take a step back, zoom out and consider our humanity and the type of society that we all would like to live in. Only then can we make a balanced evaluation of technology options whether they are for IT (Information Systems and Data Processing), OT (Automation, Process Control) and Telecommunications (Network Connectivity).

From rock bottom to head above water. You know that feeling when your car runs out of fuel and you have to push it to the gas station. Uphill. A hard road. And a most rewarding road. Game on. I found the first gas station and am still driving.

Don’t you know I’m still standing better than I ever did
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid
I’m still standing after all this time
Picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind

Here we are. It is 16th December 2019. fieldcloud is celebrating its 10th birthday today. The celebration is the delighted customers, the hard work, the sacrifices, the lessons learned and relentless spirit of never giving up. We’ve designed new hardware, mastered new embedded software architectures, integrated 3rd party cloud platforms, made new partnerships and built deeper client relationships.

What was the biggest shift? Building the company back up again from a local & regional customer base. Start in your own backyard. Even if you don’t ‘fit in’ because you weren’t born here or speak the language like a native speaker.

End of January 2019 was the second edition of Festival Transfo. We spoke at panel discussion about Agile methods for Edge Computing & Artificial Intelligence hosted by our partner Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

fieldcloud hosted a mini-event at the Grenoble Chamber of Commerce to raise awareness about the Smart Africa Smart Villages initiative in Niger.

Meanwhile, it was full steam ahead for our major IoT project for an industrial customer, designing a new hardware device based on an OEM microcontroller module from Pycom and an LTE-M/NB-IoT/GPRS modem from uBlox. We worked closely with our partners, Michael Kelly (PI2Design in Providence, Rhode Island USA) and ACJ Electronic (Villard Bonnot, France — closer to home!) and built the first custom PCB prototypes in March 2019.

Real Industrial IoT hardware, for a real Industrial IoT application. fieldcloud’s mission was crystal clear and we haven’t looked back. This is what we do and do pretty damn well!

The joy of booting a brand new device for the first time was incredible. What was even better was flashing the stock manufacturer’s firmware with our own customized version, containing our own device drivers and system libraries.

Developing embedded software using a brand new approach (mix of compiled libraries and Micropython scripting) was a super challenge and opportunity to show a fresh approach to build dynamic, reconfigurable edge processing applications.

In April we attended the 5th edition of SIdO in Lyon, no stand just a visitor this time. There was no cash to burn and priorities were different this year. It was good to meet up with our existing partner Hewlett Packard Enterprise again.

We also met up with SoftwareAG who we had got to know via one of our industrial clients. There was a good fit and appetite to work together. In June 2019 fieldcloud became an official systems integration partner for SoftwareAG’s Industrial IoT platform Cumulocity. We haven’t looked back since and have been co-selling and doing referral business development since we signed that partnership agreement. Sometimes you have run with the opportunity!

Another partnership was also put in place with French mobile operator SFR to explore joint go to market opportunities for NB-IoT connectivity. We’ve done some interesting demos using the NB-IoT network and Pycom-based Micropython applications.

3 Vital Data Feeds for Industrial IoT

I’ve spent most of my career connecting things, people and processes. Sometimes, this involves dealing with exotic…

In July 2019 it was time to head off to Niger again for the very first Innovation for Development (I4DEV) conference held during the African Union Summit in Niamey. It was brilliant opportunity to reconnect with old friends and make new ones.

The trip kicked off with a startup hackathon called HACK4DEV, all about financial inclusion in rural areas. Great topic.

The following day we had a outdoor session in the village of Sadoré to discuss Smart Village pilot projects with local and international stakeholders. This session was organized by the ITU-D. Proud that fieldcloud could have play a part in this exciting initiative for sustainable development.

Time for the main I4DEV event in Niamey. fieldcloud ran a joint stand with our local partner, Novatech a Nigerien systems & network integrator doing really cool work with voice driven rural inclusion applications for villages.

I4DEV saw the launch of Codeloccol a brand new unschool for developers modelled after initiatives like 42 in Paris. Those t-shirts below for the brand launch we made in Grenoble! I was asked by my friend Rouffahi Koabo CEO of CIPMEN (the Nigerien national startup incubator) if I could help out and keep a secret — we wanted to make sure that the new brand was a complete surprise at the event. It was!

The winners of HACK4DEV got to hang out and show off their prize during the event. It was humbling to be amongst such talented and motivated young people, hungry for experience and grabbing their own opportunities!

The joint Novatech/fieldcloud stand at I4DEV.

Our special guest from the January Festival Transfo Smart Villages mini-event, Sofie Blakstad (go read her book about the Fintech Revolution and social inclusion!) was in town to launch eArziki the first distributed ledger, digital village savings & loans platform in the world.

Last activity in Niger was an IoT embedded systems workshop for the Niamey Google Developer Group. This was really cool and we went quite deep into embedded application design & network integration topics.

Totally humbled to have met these young developers and engineers who are building tomorrow's solutions for sustainable development in Niger.

I recorded a wrap up video at the end of my stay in Niger. We can learn so much about human society in Africa and how we can best leverage the power and the responsibilities of digital technology to enhance the human experience, not diminish it.

Back in Grenoble it was time to build the 3rd generation of IoTEdge for our client. We had incorporate feedback from the 1st and 2nd generation prototypes and were converging on a solid physical package and application stack. We also started work with new clients on IoT applications, one a large chemical manufacturer, the other an SME focused on embedded electronic systems for vehicle diagnostics, cranes and outdoor plant (front end loaders and lifting equipment).

November 2019 saw the 3rd edition of the Hult Prize at Grenoble Ecole de Management. Fantastic group of motivated students and judges. This event stimulates the brain and the soul. Grateful to give some of my experience back to mentor the next generation.

Last highlight of 2019 was December's Pycom Go Invent IoT workshop in Paris, co-organized with sponsors SigFox, Sequans, Semtech & Expressif Systems. We got to cement a solid partnership with Pycom, and are looking forward to more joint initiatives and perhaps even a series of Go Invent workshops across Africa as the next phase of capacity building kicks in 2020.

Thanks Fred & Bettina for building a vibrant, worldwide IoT developer community with Pycom and pushing the envelope for powerful, low power, reconfigurable, multi-network IoT devices.

Matthew D. Smith on LinkedIn: #IoT

Thank you team Pycom (& SIGFOX) for a brilliant Go Invent event today in Paris! #IoT is on the move. 🙏👍 Fred de Haro…

I would personally like to thank everyone who has been involved in fieldcloud's journey so far. It has been a mad adventure since we launched end of 2009 and every single minute has counted towards who fieldcloud is today and how we will shape the future. Happy 10th birthday fieldcloud!

If you are curious, and would like to find out how fieldcloud can help your business leverage the power of edge computing, embedded IoT applications and smarter network connectivity then please contact us — info@fieldcloud.com, via LinkedIn or simply leave us a voice message on +33 9 77 19 99 33.

10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.

Feel the fear and do it anyway. It was a absolute question of survival. Like when you are driving across the wilderness on an empty tank of gas. I needed to find a way to pull fieldcloud back from the brink and not quit.

Nobody sets out to be a bad CEO, run a dysfunctional organization, or create a massive bureaucracy that grinds her company to a screeching halt. Yet no CEO ever has a smooth path to a great company. Along the way, many things go wrong and all of them could have and should have been avoided.

The game of business will teach you a harsh lesson.

We tried a promotional offer to sell our stock of ns-boxes. No one bought one. In fact, if you’re reading this we still have them for sale on our mini site, https://nsbox.co.

The best thing at the beginning of 2018 was there was new found sense of purpose, thanks to initiatives like Smart Africa. End of January 2018 was the first edition of Festival Transfo in Grenoble and we were invited to run IoT mini-workshops at Grenoble Ecole de Management and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The Hewlett Packard Enterprise event was very cool, there was also a speaking slot during a panel discussion on Smart Cities.

fieldcloud’s position — 2018 was the year that enterprise IoT becomes tangible & relevant.

The mini-workshops at Grenoble Ecole de Management were fun. We met a bunch of people and some new prospects. But, we did not convert any new clients. The value of basic IoT awareness building was becoming less relevant to enterprises. The real market demand was focused on solving integration challenges for companies.

It was time to head off to Rwanda for a three day IoT for African Smart Cities and Connected Communities workshop. Same format as in 2017 for Niger & Cote d’Ivoire except this time the content and delivery was in English.

It’s essential that youth in Africa (and worldwide) are included as early as possible in the global economy. The experience of delivering IoT workshops was profound.

A month later it was time to fly off to Dakar, Senegal to run the IoT for African Smart Cities & Connected Communities workshop for the Senegalese ICT Ministry.

The IoT workshop in Dakar was the largest we have ever delivered. 55 participants from all sectors, academic, public administration, startup entrepreneurs & large enterprises.

Immediately after the IoT Workshop we were invited to Diamniadio for the first edition of the Forum du Numérique, organized by the Presidency of Senegal.

Little did we know it but the reason for our attendance was to present a summary of our IoT Workshop to His Excellency, the President of Senegal, Macky Sall. That is an experience I will never forget.

We also met up with Jean-Philbert Nsengimana, former Rwanda ICT Minister and at the time special advisor to the Smart Africa secretariat.

Back in Grenoble, we hosted a delegation from the University of Rwanda to meet with our digital cluster, Minalogic and key stakeholders in the local French Tech ecosystem. fieldcloud has signed an MOU with UR-CST to collaborate on the ACE-IoT programme and we were in the process of working through a bid to provide equipment and services to build the center excellence.

Sadly, because fieldcloud was not in good shape at all as a company we were unable to fulfill all the financial criteria for successfully delivering a solution to UR-CST and we had to withdraw from the bid. I still feel really bad about this because it was a brilliant opportunity to extend fieldcloud’s footprint into Africa and deliver meaningful outcomes for youth entrepreneurship in IoT.

It was time to head back to Kigali in May 2018 for the Transform Africa Summit.

During the summit accreditation I was interviewed for the Rwanda National TV News!

Highlight of the Summit was running the icebreaker for a breakout session on Public-Private partnerships for African Smart Cities.

Towards the end of May we headed off to Germany for a new client engagement, to create a new SigFox IoT prototype for heating water treatment applications. This was the start of a turnaround for fieldcloud, with a real use case and a methodical approach to systems integration and network coverage testing.

During our drive back from Germany we made a detour and headed to Paris to visit the Vivatech trade show, having been invited by both the Rwandan government delegation and our friends from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

It was incredible surprise to see fieldcloud’s AirBoard IoT prototyping solution on display at the booth of one of our clients. In fact we had started a discussion in Q2 2018 with the Digital team in our client’s HQ and were scoping a more ambitious project. It was great to meet their Chief Digital Officer face to face at Vivatech and continue the discussion.

Vivatech was a great place to meet old and new contacts from all over the world.

Back to Grenoble and then on to Germany again for our client engagement. As we scoped out the IoT enabler prototype specifications it was clear that our AirBoard hardware was far too limited for the kind of embedded edge data processing required for the client’s heating water application. It was at this time we decided to switch over to a new generation of microcontroller hardware from Pycom. Which turned out to be a wise move. We were now able to develop real embedded software applications much more rapidly and with better modularity using Micropython instead of C/C++.

Our client was able to use the IoT prototypes to test SigFox’s network coverage in Germany. The results were not so good, and we decided to switch to cellular connectivity.

September 2018 it was back to Niamey Niger again for a Smart Village workshop with the Nigerien Information Society Agency (ANSI).

We also conducted a brief consulting engagement to develop a strategic partnership with Niger Telecoms, the incumbent telecom operator in Niger.

Mid-November saw the second edition of the Hult Prize at Grenoble Ecole de Management. Great bunch of motivated students, it was pleasure to be part of the jury.

Off to Marseille next for Emerging Valley 2018, the leading event to bring together African tech and startups. It was great opportunity to meet up with old friends from Niger, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal and Rwanda and plenty new contacts too.

After Marseille it was off to the UK for a short consulting engagement on IoT infrastructure and platforms for mining applications. There was small detour on arrival, I drove across to Guildford Surrey to make a surprise visit to Pycom’s HQ. Sadly the co-founders were out of the office but it was very cool to see the epicenter of this impressive tech startup which has now become a key partner of fieldcloud for embedded IoT solutions.

Last highlight of 2018 was signing a major IoT integration project with a key client. We launched the project in December 2018. This was the deal with allowed fieldcloud to truly turn the page and become a viable business again.

2018 was a stressful year. fieldcloud almost went out of business. It is with much gratitude that we thank our partners, clients and contacts around the world for their support and the opportunity to share a vision of digital infrastructure that serves human society and creates lasting value. Stay tuned for the next chapter…

10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.

Sustaining momentum and turning a company into a growth machine is hard. And it is dangerous to ignore the one fundamental rule of business:

• Money in > Money out

No matter how much cash you might have in the bank at a given moment, you need to have a viable plan to always ensure that funding flows into the company. Depending on the type of venture this doesn't have to be customer revenue, it could be investor capital or subsidies. We broke this rule so badly in 2017. Was it bad advice? Poor leadership? Magical thinking? Probably all of the above.

Basically we decided to throw caution to the wind, take a leap of faith and use the cash pile we had accumulated to ‘fund growth’. Up until end of 2016 we had been able to self finance a decent amount of exploratory activities (tradeshows, making prototypes, conferences, networking) as we pivoted out of the original oil & gas focus. Some good customer projects brought decent revenue but we neglected to keep our sales pipeline full.

There was another issue, our experimental Internet of Things (ELIOT) product line needed further refinement. The user experience was a bit rough. Our clients gave great feedback. There was internal conflict brewing about to best to proceed.

The idea was that our IoT kits would be used by clients to ideate, identify use cases, build prototypes and conduct experiments to measure the business value of the solution. It was a great concept but we found it difficult to go beyond basic prototyping.

We expanded the team again, adding a technical role. Before we had actually defined responsibilities and objectives. Bad idea. Our new hire wasn’t a good fit and left after two months.

It was somewhat ironic that our marketing collateral referred to “a jump into uncharted territories” — that was our situation, not necessarily the market!

The big highlight in Q1 2017 was the Grenoble Maker Faire. We had positioned fieldcloud as part of the Maker Movement, believing that this particular community was the future of product development and delivery (“This thing wasn’t invented. It was assembled.”). Perhaps we were ahead of our time, perhaps we hadn’t properly connected the dots between a hobbyist movement and the real industrial enterprise world.

In hindsight, there is clearly a compelling case for transforming traditional industry through new ways of working. The Maker Movement is a waypoint on the journey, not the destination. It was like we needed to learn this lesson the hard way!

During the Maker Faire there were two speaking engagements. I gave a Failcon talk about fieldcloud’s journey so far and some examples of where we had failed in our original mission in the oil & gas industry.

Second talk was during a panel discussion entitled “Les Makers refont le monde” (Makers fix/reshape the world). That was a definitely a cool experience.

A few weeks later it was time for the third edition of the SIdO IoT tradeshow in Lyon. We had a booth at the Minalogic digital cluster pavilion and ran a bunch of demos showing our original ns-box edge computing appliance, our ELIOT kits and tweeting Minitel.

There was a clear shift in the IoT landscape that year. The hype had passed and there was growing demand for real industrialized products and solutions. Prototyping was on the way out. Real applications were on the way in.

Was was very interesting and a bit disturbing was that we did not sign any new clients during SIdO 2017. Our offer was simply not resonating.

We ran a series of IoT hands-on experimentation workshops for non-technical roles at Grenoble Ecole de Management, educating business school post-graduate students about our view of how IoT will change the world.

In the meantime we were struggling, the decision to burn cash from our pile and the average size of client engagement meant that we started to lose money.

One of the more interesting IoT projects we did was for a Lyon-based startup building innovative parking as a service solutions. We had helped this startup in 2016 with a proof of concept and now we were building a real solution to go into a customer site.

Another corporate client signed up for a series of IoT discovery workshops in three countries, France, Germany & the USA. It was a great experience but a commercial disaster.

It was time to take break after our second client IoT workshop near Detroit, Michigan USA. I needed to clear my head and figure out a way to turn business around as fieldcloud was not in good shape in July 2017. The video below is raw, and from the heart.

Back in Grenoble after the break it was time to get serious and work out a different game plan. Our telecom operator client in London was one of the corporate sponsors of a Pan-African ICT development initiative called Smart Africa. Our client asked us to jointly run a series of workshops in African countries to raise awareness of IoT applications and kickstart the process of collaboration between government ministries/agencies, academic institutions and private sector. fieldcloud’s advantage is that we are a bilingual French/English company and can deliver solutions in either language. Now it was time to grab the opportunity and do something meaningful.

First stop was Niamey, Niger.

We ran a 3-day workshop, hosted by the Nigerien Information Society Agency, ANSI.

The advantage of working with a satellite operator is that you can be connected anywhere on the planet via their network.

The second and third workshop days was all about hands-on prototyping with ELIOT IoT kits and LoRaWAN connectivity, plus a session on collaborative project ideation and use case development.

The energy was incredible. Passionate people, great ideas and a desire to be sustainable. It was exactly the breath of fresh air and new stimulus for fieldcloud.

Each team was comprised of people from public sector, private sector (startups & established enterprises) & academic institutions. The output from the collaborative project sessions was compelling and actionable. We didn’t just grab attention but facilitated a whole new way of working together to leverage technology for sustainable development.

Next stop was Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire to run the same IoT for African Smart Cities and Connected Communities workshops for the Ivorian ministry of posts, electronic communications and digital economy.

Teamwork and co-execution between fieldcloud and our client was a real highlight. This is why it is so important to build relationships and align interests across the value chain.

The collaborative project use case sessions finished with a 5 minute interview with each team to present and review their output. It was a great way of capturing the deliverable.

The workshops were concluded with a wrap up session from the Director General for Digital Economy Mr Lassina Konate.

Then it was time to head back home to Grenoble and jump into another interesting activity organized by students from Grenoble Ecole de Management. If you haven’t heard of the Hult Prize, now you do. Change, sustainable development, youth — with a head full of insights from Niger & Cote d’Ivoire it was just brilliant to work with a bunch of enthusiastic young people pitching solutions for human society.

The following morning after the Hult Prize event it was time to fly to Kigali Rwanda for workshops and meetings hosted by the Rwanda Information Society Authority (RISA).

Telecom House is the epicenter of the ICT ecosystem in Rwanda, including data center colocation, a cybersecurity incident response center, the RISA HQ, Carnegie Mellon University Africa (before the campus moved to a new site), the Rwanda ICT Cluster and two very interesting organizations — kLab & FabLab Rwanda.

Making new contacts with people passionate about technology for sustainable development and human society continued to shift my mindset into a new gear.

Almost the entire top floor of Telecom House is shared between Fablab Rwanda and kLab. kLab is a pre-incubation space for digital skills and entrepreneur development amongst young people.

fieldcloud met with the University of Rwanda College of Science & Technology (UR-CST) and signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on developing the African Center of Excellence in IoT (ACE-IoT).

Even though fieldcloud had a disastrous year financially — we managed to wipe out our cash reserves and had to reduce our workforce — we found a powerful reason to not give up. Placing technology at the service of human society and sustainable development is the right thing for all of us to do.

fieldcloud was interviewed by the Grenoble Chamber of Commerce Magazine, Présences. The article was published in the December 2017 edition and we are proud of this public statement of record.

Heading into to 2018 was a scary time. It was time to reinvent the company again and find a way to survive. More on that in our next story…

10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.

A tale of premature scaling, bold ambitions and a radical pivot. The shock was brutal. All of the sudden there were no more oil & gas projects, our original clients scaled back activity and our core business just disappeared overnight. So we had to find a way, any road was better than no path at all.

In fact, we had been so busy evangelizing IoT and stepping outside the box that we neglected to plan ahead and fill our sales pipeline. The whole IoT thing in 2015 was incredibly immature, everyone was learning and investing in new ideas. So were we, and it was so enjoyable that the mundane core business took a back seat.

After wrapping up the last oil & gas cybersecurity professional services engagement in January we worked with a Grenoble-based startup to deploy a custom IoT solution at ski station in the heart of the French Alps. Talk about a change of scenery!

The solution required a local 868Mhz ISM band network and gateway for cloud API integrations. We used our 8GATE product which was installed in the cable car control room. It provided wireless coverage around the site to collect data from snow sensors made by our startup client.

Our client had built an interesting sensor application for measuring the height of snow. The core product used the SigFox network which was still being deployed across France and there was no coverage in some remote mountain locations. Hence the need for a private ISM band network.

fieldcloud became a member of the Minalogic digital technologies cluster. It was very cool to become part of a broader ecosystem. We met some interesting people during a Minalogic session and was invited to speak at an Italian cybersecurity event called Grappa Hat in March 2016. That was one hell of an opportunity. So we got creative as you can see from the summary below!

TITLE: Fredo, you broke my HART
ABSTRACT: A story of moral turpitude and vagina dentata in the petroleum
industry. From honeytraps to honeypots, giving head to get the wellhead.
Pwned by a filthy vector in the dark underbelly of offshore life.

Next port of call was London to talk IoT with our good friends from Galaxy1. We installed demo sensors and gateway kit in their offices, including a temperature sensor application on the SigFox network. This was used as our control point for checking SigFox coverage in the UK.

Positioning fieldcloud products in London helped us to get referred and sign up a new telecom operator client later in the year. More on that below.

April 2016 saw the second edition of SIdO the French IoT trade show in Lyon. We went all in, teamed up with the Minalogic ecosystem and built a multi-network demonstrator showcasing SigFox, LoRaWAN, GSM GPRS, ZigBee & WiFi connectivity using our modular, pluggable AirBoard.

Just after SIdO we received our bulk order of 500 AirBoards. Just in the nick of time as we had already sold the first 100 to France’s first public LoRaWAN operator to include with their developer kits. It was cool to be part of this early phase of discovery across the industry.

Our partner Cogent Computer Systems Inc launched a new product line of Raspberry PI add-on boards and we obtained some early prototypes of their cell modem hat. Which came in useful for our next project.

We helped a startup in Lyon deploy a proof of concept for sharing private parking lots. Our client needed to urgently demonstrate their end to end application to secure investment funding and we stepped in to build an edge gateway solution based on a customized 8GATE with cellular connectivity and relays for driving the parking boom gates. We also leveraged the fieldcloud service network (which was originally built for oil & gas secure data logistics) and extended the capabilities with additional API integrations.

To further extend the AirBoard’s capabilities and keeping with our vision of modular, pluggable IoT devices we designed and built our own extension boards for RS232, sensor interfaces and power supply.

Of course retrocomputing is one of our passions here at fieldcloud and we created a server emulation that ran on an AirBoard allowing users to tweet from a vintage Minitel terminal for the Grenoble computer museum Aconit.

We also improved our Sinclair ZX Spectrum Twitter ‘client’!

Another fieldcloud extension board for the AirBoard was our PR-1 programmer/debugger board which allows developers to sandwich the wireless module and AirBoard to deploy code and debug embedded applications with dual serial ports.

Alex Aguila joined the fieldcloud team during the summer of 2016. We been awarded a bid from an academic institution in Grenoble to build experimental IoT kits and educational content for business & management students (i.e. technology for non-technical roles). Alex brought both mechanical engineering and educational workshop content development skills.

We instituted Friday Hack or FrHack Days at fieldcloud, for building new prototypes and experimenting with ideas. It help us get up to speed with how best to combine mechanical, electronics and software together.

As part of the programme to develop IoT kits we launched a new brand called ELIOT (Experimental Internet of Things) which was intended to differentiate this new product line from the traditional fieldcloud systems integration business.

These new ELIOT kits attracted a fair amount of attention and we signed a new telecom operator client. We designed customized kits and a package of workshops for business unit line management and presales functions to build awareness and understanding of IoT devices and networks.

October 2016 was the second edition of IoT Planet in Grenoble. fieldcloud teamed up with our academic institution client to run IoT demos.

Immediately after IoT Planet it was all systems go for finishing assembly on the 15 IoT kits and 2 programming stations to ship to London for our client!

The following week it was showtime and we ran the first round of IoT workshops for senior staff from marketing, finance, product management, sales and solution engineering functions.

We finished 2016 on a high note and there were great moments. Revenue was up. But, cracks were starting to show. Could we sustain and build momentum? Find out what happened in our next story.

10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.

Grab the IoT tiger by the tail and jump headfirst into the brave new world of low power wireless area networking (LPWAN) & rapid prototyping. 2015 kicked off with a solid backlog of customer projects, delivering cybersecurity professional services for subsea flexible riser surveillance systems. Because we had the year fully planned out it gave us the freedom to incubate some new ideas on how we could leverage modular, pluggable Internet of Things devices.

First step was supporting the AirBoard Kickstarter campaign. fieldcloud was the first backer, seeding the launch. At the end of the campaign over 1000 backers from about 40 countries funded $65k. Enough to start volume production.

During the campaign we met up with Olivier Menard the AirBoard's creator and Jean Poma, who was community manager during the Kickstarter campaign.

fieldcloud hosted a livestream AirBoard party in our workspace during the campaign to showcase this little embedded device for rapid, modular IoT experimentation.

It was during this time that we invited Jean to join the fieldcloud team to drive new IoT business around the AirBoard.

At the end of the campaign we discovered that SigFox had invited the AirBoard team to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Olivier wasn't able to attend due to other commitments so we made a plan to have fieldcloud represent the AirBoard and spend time with the SigFox team in Barcelona. MWC15 was definitely worthwhile and we got to meet up with many old telecom industry contacts, including the CTO of a well known Canadian mobile operator who wanted to our opinion of IoT connectivity market trends.

SigFox actually had the AirBoard on display at their stand at Mobile World Congress. How was cool that!

Next port of call was a trip to FabLab London to meet up with Tony Fish (another old telecom industry contact) & Andre Gregson + our friends from Arkessa to have a chat about modular IoT rapid prototyping.

Back in Grenoble, John Dimatos from the Kickstarter team came to visit and have a chat with the startup ecosystem. Prior to mid-2015 it wasn't possible for French companies to run a Kickstarter campaign using a French legal entity. The only way was to incorporate a foreign company (typically US, UK or Dutch based) as vehicle. As there were some great success stories, including the AirBoard, Kickstarter wanted to ensure that their entry into the French market was on the right track.

fieldcloud signed up to exhibit at the very first French IoT trade show, SIdO (Salon Internet des Objets) held in Lyon. We put on a great demo, weaving together the ns-box running edge gateway applications with the AirBoard communicating over ZigBee. It was during SIdO that we met our very first non oil & gas corporate customer, the market leader in water technologies.

One month later we were invited by Kickstarter to Paris for the Maker Faire and met up with Julio Terra to showcase the AirBoard and do some evangelization to the French maker community. Totally by chance we met up with the Arduino team during the event, who were impressed with the AirBoard's modular form factor and Arduino compatibility. We were invited to a special event in June 2015 at Arduino's home base in Turin, Italy.

We established a partnership with Atim Radiocommunications, starting with their SigFox pluggable modules and later with LoRaWAN.

After the Paris Maker Faire we headed off to Turin, Italy to spend time with the Arduino folks during the Torino Mini Maker Faire and the inauguration of Casa Jasmina a connected living lab apartment.

A totally awesome highlight at Casa Jasmina was hanging out with non other than famous cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling! Bruce was one of the co-founders of Casa Jasmina with Jasmina Tešanović and Massimo Banzi.

Back in Grenoble we were building a new, compact IoT box based on a Raspberry PI single board computer and an Atim SigFox/868MHz FSK add-on board. The idea was to create a solution for a local ISM band radio gateway for private networks with either Ethernet backhaul or messaging using the SigFox network. This product became known as the 8GATE.

In autumn 2015 fieldcloud and Atim exhibited at the very first Grenoble Mini Maker Faire. We had some cool IoT demos running with sensors, gateways and even a 1985 vintage Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128K+ microcomputer connected to an AirBoard via RS232. The embedded application was configured to send text messages from the ZX Spectrum over a private 868MHz ISM network to a Twitter API gateway service!

Another new event called IoT Planet was held in Grenoble during October 2015. We had a small booth during the event and speaking during during a startup pitch session.

The talk we gave at IoT Planet started with "This is not a pitch", because it wasn't. We wanted to talk about the broader issues and opportunities with the Internet of Things and share our thoughts about how the landscape was changing. Below is a transcript of our presentation.

1. Keep Calm and Game the Change. Do you get the feeling sometimes that standards initiatives feel more like gaming the change, instead of changing the game? I do.

a. Multiple, valid but incompatible implementations

b. Vested interests

c. Legacy compatibility

d. Rent seeking from dominant players

We’ve seen this before.

2. With all the industry hype it’s easy to believe in the quest for the ultimate IoT standard. A framework to control entire markets.

3. Right now there are many, many initiatives. Seriously. Some pre-date IoT, some are geared to preserve incumbent positions and some are progressive and admirable. Do we really need a new ultimate standard?

4. …………… Or would it be better to rather merge or retire some existing initiatives? Adding yet another standard to an already crowded situation impacts our credibility.

5. Standards aren’t only about building better mousetraps. Consider the market opportunity to sell mice crash helmets! Sure it’s a threat to the mousetrap business, but what an incredible opportunity for economic transformation. That’s the power of disruption.

6. Keep in mind that the landscape is changing. Monolithic 20th century dinosaurs are dying and little penguins are thriving… How does this affect standards development?

7. IoT is not a single ecosystem. Just like planet Earth. We need to focus standardization efforts to create and nurture many thriving ecosystems, including ones that might seem out of place or even irrelevant. The Maker Movement, open source software and open hardware are some that spring to mind. Tomorrow’s critical mass is going to emerge from these spaces…

8. …creating an unstoppable force…. Something which fieldcloud is proud to be part of. Just recently Grenoble held its first Mini Maker Faire with over 9000 visitors over the two day event. These are future engineers and scientists, they are learning new techniques for making tomorrow’s products.

9. In hindsight, the Internet community has been incredibly successful through the use of rough consensus and running code. For the Internet of Things I would like to add extensible, remixable hardware to this winning formula.

10. Innovative real world IoT applications will be assembled by ponies, amplifying the value delivered by unicorns. Standards should help not hinder. Standards should lower barriers to market entry.

11. So let’s Keep Calm and Change the Game.

a. Make it easy for startups and SMEs to participate and contribute to the standards process.

b. Keep a light touch, with continued emphasis on rough consensus, running code and extensible hardware.

12. A quick word about us. fieldcloud provides professional services, hardware products and secure network connectivity services. Our historical focus is the upstream oil & gas industry. But we are also makers at heart and are helping new startups and SMEs thrive in their ecosystems. For the last 6 years we have been 100% self-funded, cash flow positive and very, very busy helping our clients create new value. Hope you enjoyed this, I certainly have.

It would probably be appropriate to close this story with a quick summary of our oil & gas cybersecurity professional services engagements in 2015. During the first half of 2015 we were in Southampton, UK hardening PC-based SCADA packages, supporting the client through a 3rd-party cybersecurity audit and executing Factory Acceptance Testing. This package from our client was in fact the only system to pass cybersecurity audit without major issues, exceptions or remediation. It was very a cool experience. During the second half of 2015 production of these systems moved to Aberdeen and we spent a great deal of time between all the interesting IoT events described above working through system hardening, configuration, factory acceptance testing and auditing.

Sadly the upstream oil & gas industry was suffering a major downturn and our client had no projects in their pipeline for 2016. So we were obliged to pivot out of our original core business and look for other industry sectors. More on this in our next story…

10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.

Rugged edge computing meets managed services + new & unexpected opportunities. 2014 kicked off at a furious pace. We finalized the ns-box revision 2 just before moving into a newly renovated workspace. The game changer was fibre optic connectivity, extending our service network hosted in Paris with our local testbed & integration platform. It had become very frustrating deploying virtual machine images over an ADSL circuit! The new workspace was arranged with an electronics station, rackspace for hosting our dev machines & network gear (by the way, we deployed ns-boxes for our primary & secondary firewall routers).

Totally by chance we met up with a bunch of really cool people at Cowork in Grenoble which opened our eyes to a whole local ecosystem of startups and tech companies. We got connected with the local French Tech initiative, originally called Digital Grenoble now known as French Tech in the Alps and became a founding member. It was the moment to step outside the oil & gas box and explore new opportunities.

We also got invited to speak at SMI's Oil & Gas Telecommunications & M2M for Oil & Gas conferences in London. Which was a very cool experience.

On the oil & gas project front we were asked to build a custom ns-odu field ready enclosure kit with 110V AC power for a remote well site deployment in Casabe, Colombia!

Connectivity at the client's well site was via Inmarsat BGAN and the ns-box was configured to automatically acquire and process data from downhole fibre optic distributed temperature sensing instruments.

Next major project was for an independent oil company in Nigeria who had recently acquired brownfield assets in the Niger Delta. The brief required an end-to-end secure data logistics solution with managed services. So we extended our service network with VPN capabilities to provide a secure data path between the well site satellite connection (using Inmarsat BGAN) and the client's application hosted in Lagos, while keep system management and monitoring internal to fieldcloud. Thanks to our connectivity partners Arkessa & Galaxy1 we now operated a hybrid terrestrial cellular & mobile satellite closed user group network.

Before heading off to Lagos and Port Harcourt Nigeria we were invited to a pre-launch workshop for a brand new embedded electronic rapid prototyping platform called the AirBoard. Until now, we hadn't really done much with microcontrollers as our main focus had been on edge gateway computing with real operating systems. So this little device opened our eyes to new possibilities and set the scene for a whole new line of business.

The workshop/pre-launch event in June 2014 was very cool. We built a radio controlled helium balloon which was piloted via a bluetooth interface and were part of a video shoot for the AirBoard's crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter (which was launched in early 2015, more on that in the next story!).

https://youtu.be/NUZSucqCeEI

Introduced new governing principles: Make it minimal. Make it viable. Make it simple.

Back to Nigeria for another adventure. We spent about two weeks fitting out a recycled shipping container to house instrumentation & the edge computing system and fabricated a mast for the BGAN satellite terminal which was mounted already pointed to the correct azimuth and elevation for the client site.

Training field engineers how to rig up the satellite terminal and mast.

Kit nicely fitted inside the shipping container.

Team work is everything. Grateful to all the support and flawless on-site installation by Muyiwa Aboaba and his colleagues from Port Harcourt.

Sadly we weren't able to travel to the client's well site due to security restrictions. All the commissioning was done remotely from Port Harcourt in communication with the on-site field engineers. What was special about this project is that it was our first managed services deployment with remote system management provided by fieldcloud.

Following the Nigeria project we shipped ns-box kit to Canada for deployment at remote well sites in the tar sands used for monitoring steam injection, aka SAGD (Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage). This was also deployed as a managed service with M2M cellular connectivity from Arkessa. We also hosted the client software application in our secure service network in Paris.

What was unusual about this deployement is that the system was powered using a hybrid methanol fuel cell and solar panels. In the Canadian winter there isn't enough sunlight for solar PV and in summer the site is completely inaccessible as the tundra thaws into muddy swampland. After all our adventures the previous year in hot desert conditions it was good to also prove the ns-box worked in -40 degree ambient temperatures. We had a bit of help with the fuel cell which heated up the enclosure a bit.

Towards the end of 2014 we kicked off a very different project. Our client was building a subsea flexible riser surveillance system and needed to pass a cybersecurity audit. More on that in our next story!

10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.

Connected. Integrated. No time to waste, we hit the ground running in January 2013, assembled a fleet of ns-boxes for upcoming customer deployments and jumped straight into two very different projects.

We were asked to design and build a secure multi-site network for a gas pipeline surveillance application in Algeria. We can't really go into too many details about the solution due to client confidentiality agreements but what was interesting was that sites were located between 50km and 100km apart, requiring ultra long range SFP fiber modules. VLANs were trunked between sites, creating separate infrastructure management, data acquisition and operator access segments with host-based firewalls to filter IP traffic. The system is still in production today.

The day after we finished factory assembly and internal pre-acceptance testing we flew out to Abu Dhabi to install a data logistics solution in two different oil fields in the Arabian desert. This was the start of a 'trial by fire' and many important lessons were learned about extreme environments, civil engineering in desert conditions and how cross-functional communication between different departments is vital to ensure a successful outcome.

There a been a chronic lack of coordination between the primary end user client contact in HQ, our direct client (supplying the solution to the end user customer) and the oil field facilities prime contractor (and their subcontractors). It is dangerous to assume that component equipment (such as the ns-box) would somehow magically housed within an equipment shelter. We found out one week before the install date that the facilities contractor was expecting my direct client to provide a complete floor mounted enclosure solution. So we had to improvise. Fortunately the facilities contractor was able to fabricate frames from stainless steel T bar. Meanwhile we had to find a way to colocate the ns-box inside an existing instrument enclosure. Which at the time seemed like a good idea…

The kit was installed and commissioned on time. And everyone was happy until the beginning of the UAE summer, where the ambient temperature in the deserts goes above 55ºC. We learned a harsh lesson about thermal management and how easy it is to underestimate safety margins when designing a hardware product. When you install equipment in a stainless steel sealed enclosure, you don't have airflow and can only rely on conductive cooling. The original ns-box design didn't conduct enough heat away from the CPU and we destroyed 4 units in the field.

We went back to Abu Dhabi in August, the hottest month of the year. Outdoor work is severely restricted in midsummer and we were only able to work between dawn and midday, in 20 minute shifts with a 10 minute rest to cool off. We had leave our Land Cruiser's engine running with the air conditioning on full. We pulled out the ns-boxes and tried to improve things by adding a fan (brand name, Lucky Sky 😉). This worked up to a point, until the fans themselves overheated and died!

It took a lot of effort but we managed to radically improve the thermal efficiency of the ns-box by adding a machined aluminium block inside its enclosure which was mated to the CPU module using a special resin. This heatsink was itself mated to the outer enclosure. Problem solved!

We also improved the field installation by adding an customized fieldcloud ns-odu enclosure system with push-pull forced cooling. These were deployed inside the passively cooled shelters in the desert.

Meanwhile we were also hard at work with the revision 2 ns-box with redundant protection for all input/output interfaces (Ethernet, Serial, relays). We also switched to Greenliant SSD modules and added a high-temperature battery for the real time clock. All of these improvements were thanks to real world torture testing in the desert, which helped us build a tough, rugged product able to withstand extreme conditions.

We learned a lot in the field during 2013 which helped set the stage for even more interesting projects the following year!

10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.

Edge computing ahead of its time. Challenge accepted. This brave new world of what we called 'secure data logistics' (more commonly referred today as 'Industrial Internet of Things') was extremely exciting. Instead of building rack cabinets of industrial PCs, switches & firewalls we put our efforts into designing a low power consumption (9-11 Watts!), small form factor networked appliance with our design partner Cogent Computer Systems Inc. From experience and customer feedback gained over the previous two years it made perfect sense to create a 100% passively cooled (fanless), ruggedized machine with enough processing power, memory & storage to run advanced software applications at remote sites.

So we introduced the ns-box…

Our first prototype had a couple of flaws. We forgot to offset the Ethernet connectors to allow for the 2mm thick aluminium front plate so the final result looked a bit weird. While we were developing the gigabit Ethernet switch Linux device driver we discovered that the chip wasn't interfaced correctly to the CPU!

In Q1 2012 we did a PCB respin to correct the issues and also grew the board in size to make it easier to factory fit SIM cards. The other reason for growing the PCB was that we could use standard enclosure parts from our partner Lincoln Binns.

Building a custom Linux kernel and Debian operating system was a lot of fun. We wanted to keep the OS footprint as minimalist as possible while leveraging the vast collection of maintained software packages and libraries. This came in handy when we worked with clients on developing the end to end application stack and porting software from Intel PCs to our ARM9 platform.

Of course, to bring the ns-box to market we had to take the product through formal laboratory testing at LCIE Bureau Veritas. This was another interesting learning experience and we are still grateful to the test engineers and their useful feedback which helped us improve the product further.

Of course, the ns-box was a component piece of equipment and had to be housed in a proper enclosure for deployment in harsh oil & gas production sites. We designed and built our own enclosures, offering a field-ready rapid deployment kit. These were first used in the United Arab Emirates for automating data delivery from downhole permanent gauge systems at remote well sites into the client's analytics applications hosted in their headquarters in Abu Dhabi.

During our mission in Abu Dhabi we worked with a local contractor to built a mounting frame for deployment in at the client's desert location. This was going to be a totally self contained system, with solar power and cellular connectivity.

We finished 2012 on a high note, having successfully completed site integration testing and assembly for the client. Now it was time to prepare for the following year's adventures in desert.

Projects. Projects. Projects! Nothing like projects to get one fired up, and we certainly needed the extra heat to deal with the bitter winter cold of Alberta, Canada. First destination for 2011 was Edmonton to kick off an infrastructure project for hosting a new upstream oil & gas web application stack.

We got ourselves and our client into the brave new world of virtual machines running on VMWare ESXi. It was pretty cool to be able to build machine images at our home base in Grenoble and deploy them over secured management VPNs to datacenters in Calgary, Edmonton & Paris. This project also saw us leveraging the power of NGINX for frontend reverse proxy and content acceleration duties. Unfortunately the commercial web application software package selected by our client suffered from some horrible performance limitations due to the underlying Microsoft ISAPI. We were able to obtain a 50% performance boost by implementing SSL offload and judicious use of HTTP request pipelining in NGINX.

The infrastructure solution also included a secured management network using a bastion jump host and internal VLANs for systems administration. In fact this original design was the basis for the fieldcloud service network which is still in production today.

In June 2011, we deployed a beta test production environment colocated in the Telus IDC in Calgary. Our client had wanted to have the application hosted within their M2M field connectivity vendor's space to ensure minimal latency between the vendor's middleware stack and the new web application's backend. However, the vendor wasn't too happy about sharing Internet bandwidth for the web application front end and aggressively rate shaped the traffic. So we ended up switching over to fieldcloud's service network in Paris which dramatically boosted performance and ended up providing a good experience to beta test users worldwide. Sadly, the beta test was not successful due to limitations in the commercial software package and the solution was retired at the end of 2011.

Meanwhile, another project was gaining momentum. This was our first foray into edge computing. Based on our experiences in Angola the previous year, we knew that shrinking the field hardware footprint was very important for remote offshore platforms, especially those with limited onboard power (i.e. solar panels with DC only supply) and physical space.

We took an TS7800 industrial single board computer from Technologic Systems, added dual SSDs running in a RAID1 mirror configuration and added a second Ethernet port. Built a custom Debian Linux OS and wrote device drivers to manage an Inmarsat BGAN satellite terminal.

We met up with a cool UK based electronic enclosure specialist, Lincoln Binns who built a really neat, ruggedized housing for our prototype ns-box.

Next stop was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to plan the very first deployment of new generation edge computing and data delivery for the oilfield.

The real fun part of the project was in Labuan, a tiny island off the north coast of Borneo. We needed to retrofit an existing well-site communications enclosure with our ns-box prototype, rewiring the entire assembly, testing the end to end system and training a team of field engineers responsible for the offshore installation.

The solution deployed offshore allowed our client and their client to not only monitor subsurface pressure & temperature but also to perform some advanced pressure transient analytics to help with future production optimization.

We learned a lot about designing small form factor edge computing appliances for harsh environments. The prototype worked quite well but was based on an older ARM9 system on chip running at 500MHz with only 128MB RAM. We managed to leverage the fast SSD RAID1 storage to offset the limited RAM but it was clear that we could improve performance and reliability. Also, the prototype was a bit clunky inside with 2.5" SSDs and multiple printed circuit boards (including a USB to Ethernet adapter). This led to fieldcloud's first proper product development project to build the real ns-box.

10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.

The very first fieldcloud engagement was for an oil & gas brownfield project offshore Angola. Talk about jumping off the deep end! Literally.

Offshore survival training is pretty crazy. The most fun part of the programme is the HUET, or Helicopter Underwater Escape Training. You learn how to hold your breath, stay calm and break out of ditched helicopter that has flipped over underwater. I had to do my training in the middle of winter in Marseille, the water temperature was only 6ºC.

We designed a solution for ‘lights out’ management of new downhole data acquisition systems installed on an unmanned, remote production platform. The systems were configured to automatically deliver sensor data over a satellite connection to a onshore application stack, hosted inside the client’s on-premise datacenter.

10 years ago, everything was PC-based running good old Windows desktop software intended to be operated locally. So we added IP-KVM and IP-PDU units to the 19" rack cabinet. The client needed to ensure that the field systems could be maintained from their HQ in Luanda, without sending personnel offshore unless absolutely necessary.

It was a lot of fun dragging crate loads of gear from supply boats, through a drilling rig and onto a rusty old 1980s vintage production platform. The best was fitting out the 19" rack cabinet and bringing up the systems in a confined space!

Meanwhile back in town we had a bunch of physical servers to deploy — it was a pretty heavy footprint with Oracle relational databases, WITSML decoding frontends and thick PC client applications for gas lift optimization analytics.

One of the challenges we faced was a requirement to extract data from legacy process control and SCADA systems on the platform. I had previous experience with old automation gear (mainly Westinghouse & Motorola RTUs) but this was the first time I saw a real April SMC 600 in action. We had to hack an interface together using a current loop RS232 converter and a Modbus TCP/serial RTU gateway. The experience was sort of like a crazy mashup episode of MacGyver teaming up with Indiana Jones. 😉

Logistics is always a fun part of an offshore project, involving boats, helicopters, drilling rigs and platforms. Transferring personnel during crew rotation between a supply boat and an accommodation platform is quite an ordeal, especially when using a FROG that holds only 9 people at a time!

Some excellent lessons were learned in Angola and the experience got us thinking about how to design more compact systems for automated data delivery between the field and client headquarters. During the second half of 2010, we sketched out a new architecture which led to the next chapter of our story.

Our major client at the time approved a new product development project at the end of 2010, based on the concept architecture we helped them specify. This led to the next chapter — how fieldcloud created our first edge computing gateway appliance product.

10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.