Servitization creates new opportunities to expand business and produce recurring revenue. MicroEJ enables the creation of an ecosystem of 3rd parties to grow device functionality for fragmented markets and provides the foundation to monetize your products as services.
Servitization
Device manufacturers have long tried to add a predictable and steady high-margin recurring revenue flow to their mix. Recurring revenue is usually generated though a “device plus” model: device plus maintenance, device plus upgrades.
Servitization allows an outcome-based or as-a-service model that flips the script, the device sales becoming secondary compared to the service revenue flow. Ideally, the as-a-service model can replace the device plus model totally, and transform manufacturers into service or outcome providers, with financial performance largely independent from the device sales.
Using MICROEJ VEE, manufacturers can create software-defined devices that enable services as a combination of cloud, edge, and device computing. MICROEJ FORGE adds the capability to distribute and monetize applications with an app or service store. Industry leaders have used MicroEJ to build innovative service model in industries as diverse as smart grid, home appliance, smart home, wearables, medical devices and factory automation.
The foundation of any servitization strategy is to create an ecosystem and developer community that will scale applications and services.
The common roadblocks for building an open ecosystem are the protection of your Intellectual Property (IP) protection, the APIs definition and the size of the community.
The MicroEJ embedded software platform offers virtualization and a standard software API. Virtualization hides implementation details to keep your firmware components secret. The standard API set offers developers an easy way to design applications for wide product ranges in the ecosystem.
In addition, MICROEJ VEE addresses the Java, JavaScript, Android and C communities through its managed code framework: this makes it easy to access to a very large community of available, skilled developers. As such, the community that understands MicroEJ accounts for about 20 million skilled developers across the world.
Many markets such as Energy or Home Appliances require manufacturers to fine-tune their product portfolio to fit all customer needs.
If distributors and third parties of your ecosystem can add features to your product, you will receive many benefits including:
Servitization
The virtualization offered by MicroEJ technology hides processor architectures, RTOS flavors and software toolchains so that developers can keep using the same APIs (at binary level) even if the product implementation changes. Developers can therefore address several products with one single implementation of a feature.
When dealing with large ecosystems and various products, it is not possible for developers to test their apps on all devices. MICROEJ SDK allows device manufacturers to develop Virtual Devices that simulate actual products and allows developers to design and test their apps on several devices from their workstations.
MicroEJ Application Store offers white label application store instances manufacturers can integrate to their IT backend (CRM, data and device management cloud services).
The application store can be used for storing and deploying software assets such as apps and virtual devices.
The multi-application runtime offers sandboxes for each application (apps) executed on MICROEJ VEE. This isolation offers data privacy, prevents an application crash from jeopardizing the rest of the system also and controls access rights to the hardware resources including RAM, CPU and other resources such as storage or communication links.
