The tremendous growth potential of the IoT has created a market battle between many large, well-known companies such as Amazon, Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. But how do smaller companies and startups become competitive in the race for IoT success? One answer: create or exploit a niche within the IoT. PubNub is a notable entrant in this respect.

Streaming of real time data is useful in a variety of IoT applications, including finance, weather, traffic, communication, E-commerce, security, systems control, home and vehicle automation, advertising, and gaming. Since PubNub's founding in 2009, the company has firmly established itself in the market and claims to be the only global-scale network for real time data streaming for web, mobile, and IoT devices.

PubNub founder and CEO Todd Greene told VDC that the company uses 14 datacenters worldwide, connecting nearly 300 million devices, and processing over 350 billion messages per month at 1/4 second or less latency. Over 2,000 customers are responsible for that immense amount of data traffic. Greene said that PubNub has been able acquire an abundance of customers because it supplies consistent solutions to overcome some of the IoT’s most daunting obstacles: lack of security/privacy, demanding resource requirements, and complexity of use.

Though the IoT is growing rapidly, some customers are still hesitant to adopt connected products and solutions because of recent concerns about cyber security (or lack thereof). In addition, developers struggle to design and maintain secure systems while being fully transparent with their customers about the security measures that they are taking. PubNub reduces security risks by eliminating open network ports (by tunneling data through HTTPS), supplying authentication and access to data at a granular level (from both the server and user sides), and encrypting data with AES 256.

Developers often have limited resources and are constrained in the amounts of data that they can use. Energy saving is also a necessity as portable and mobile devices and communications services expand their capabilities. The desire to maintain an open connection for data streaming may lead developers to expect that considerable bandwidth and energy are required, however, PubNub is optimized for low bandwidth usage and low battery drain. For example, only 15 to 17 kilobytes of data per day are needed for a device to maintain a persistent two-way network connection. To conserve battery power, PubNub has a keep-alive verification that only occurs every 5 minutes. A typical 60 second ping notification, commonly used by Apple (APNS) and Android (GCM) devices, causes heavier battery drain. PubNub can further reduce its energy use via multiplexing, which allows data to be aggregated and streamed from multiple PubNub channels simultaneously over one TCP socket connection.

Similar to data streaming services such as Pusher, PubNub lets developers easily create apps through APIs. Greene said that PubNub sets itself apart by supporting over 70 SDKs which allows it to handle almost every type of connected device and protocol, and cater to a broad range of users. And because it keeps a persistent socket connection, users do not have to hassle with configuring firewalls, proxy servers, antivirus, or resolving double NAT. This significantly reduces the cost and complexity of building and maintaining infrastructure for products and services while also offering easy scalability.

In a broad sense, PubNub’s services are similar to content delivery networks such as Akamai and Limelight, but PubNub focuses on real time IoT data streams with device presence detection. PubNub’s Greene summarizes the service with the term RAFTA, short for routing, augmentation, filtration, transportation and aggregation.

PubNub’s unique position and foothold in the IoT market give it the potential to expand and further monetize its business (which is based 100% on recurring revenues). The company has already developed services targeted at vertical market applications, such as fleet vehicle dispatch and home automation, and will be adding more soon. For OEMs or prospective business partners seeking IoT services, PubNub is a company to keep in mind.

View the 2017 IoT & Embedded Technology Research Outline to learn more.