International CES award honoree chooses leading cloud platform for connected products over internal build for faster time-to-market
Axeda Corporation announced today that ecoATM, a manufacturer of innovative kiosks that automate the buy-back of used portable electronics and mobile phones directly from consumers, chose Axeda to connect and remotely manage its machines.
Axeda is the leading provider of cloud-based software for managing connected products and implementing innovative machine-to-machine (M2M) applications.
ecoATM kiosks provide a convenient trade-in solution that electronically and visually inspects a consumer electronics device, pays consumers immediately in cash or store credit, and automatically administers trade-in/trade-up promotions for retailers and manufacturers. Their kiosks are in locations throughout California with a nationwide rollout planned in 2012.
“I’ve designed and developed self-service kiosk technology for numerous companies over the past 20 years and have always looked for buy vs. build opportunities on aspects that weren’t part of the core technology,” said John Beane, vice president, engineering at ecoATM.
“My opinion is that I’d rather buy and integrate someone else’s technology, basically because I am able to benefit from having features out of the box that we may not be able to develop ourselves for months or even years.”
Beane said:
“When scaling a kiosk product from tens to hundreds and thousands of sites, the greatest operational challenge is how to monitor the systems, remotely service them, and both manage and deploy software releases. When evaluating Axeda, the buy decision was an easy one.”
“Axeda has been working on this product for years. They have far more software and quality engineers working on this than I could afford for this function. So, out of the gate, we have a sophisticated system for remotely monitoring and servicing our kiosks. Even more important to me than that is the flexibility and ease that Axeda provides for managing and deploying software to our kiosks. The return on investment is almost immediate.”
Serving more than 150 of the world’s leading product manufacturers, Axeda’s connected product management applications provide advanced capabilities to manage connected intelligent assets. Axeda’s application and data integration platform enables companies to M2Mize (use M2M data to optimize) their business processes including billing, configuration management, and consumable management or build new innovative applications for their customers.
“Over the years, we have helped many companies maximize the uptime and operational performance of their products by providing the ability to connect and securely manage them remotely,” said Bill Zujewski, executive vice president of product strategy and marketing, Axeda. “We enjoy working with pioneering companies like ecoATM and congratulate them for again being named a CES Innovations Design and Engineering Awards honoree.”
ecoATM has been the recipient of numerous awards. A partial list includes: Popular Science’s 2010 Best of What’s New Award in Green Technology; Coinstar’s Next Big Idea Contest; CONNECT’s Most Innovative Product Award 2009 – Clean Tech category; GigaOm Earth2Tech’s Green:Net 2010 Launchpad competition; IEEE Spectrum: Green Goddess Award for DEMO Spring 2011; and recognition by the United Nation’s Low Carbon Leadership program as one of the leading ideas in the world for global reduction of co2 emissions.
