Should RESTful APIs Be Part of Your IoT Strategy

13 Jul 2022
HMS Networks provides REST APIs that allow you to collect historical data, monitor, control, and manage your connected devices and even automate your systems. See the impact they can have on your IoT Strategy

IoT has been exponentially growing across various industries. In today’s data-driven business environment, the ability to integrate multiple systems and share data between them has become a major aspect of the overall business IoT strategy.

Across all industry sectors, customers looking to implement IoT projects to use their systems’ data to reduce downtime, reduce costs, develop new revenue streams, and much more.

Some of the major benefits of data integration include:

Timely access to accurate data

Real-time monitoring

Process automation

Risk reduction

Enhanced employee productivity and efficiency

Improvements to customer service

Facilitate predictive maintenance

Enable mobile applications

Reduction of operating costs

 

Scalability and integration capabilities should be key considerations when implementing end-to-end IoT business solutions.

At HMS, aside from providing the hardware that allows the exchange of data with machines and connects them to the cloud, we have developed advanced RESTful APIs that facilitate the integration with internal and external systems. For example, suppose you want to have the historical data from an assembly line connected to an Ewon Flexy be visible in the company’s cloud-based ERP system. In that case, you could use one of our REST APIs to enable these systems to exchange data.

HMS Networks provides REST APIs that allow you to collect historical data, monitor, control, and manage your connected devices and even automate your systems.

 

What is an API?

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It enables sharing of data and information between applications, systems, and devices, and generally allows all these things to talk with each other.

 

What is RESTful API? And why is it relevant for IoT applications?

RESTful or REST is an architectural style of API, and it stands for Representational State Transfer. When people use the term REST or RESTful API, they are generally referring to an API that is accessed via the HTTP(S) protocol.

This API architectural style is widely used for web services integrations and IoT applications mostly because of its:

Language-independency

Flexibility

Scalability

 

HMS Networks RESTful APIs

At HMS we offer different APIs depending on the product and the application, depending on the application and what the project objectives are you might want to use one or the other, or a combination.

The DataMailbox API for Ewon Flexy enables the retrieval of historical data from the Ewon gateway.


The M2Web API for Ewon Cosy and Flexy facilitates the exchange of live data with the Ewon remote gateways including the devices connected to their LAN network.


The Argos API for Ewon Netbiter, allows both, the retrieval of historical data and the exchange of live data with the Netbiter gateways.

 

HMS Networks’ Turn-key Solutions for Third-Party Cloud Service Providers

Microsoft Azure and AWS IoT Platforms are leading the way for the ubiquitous IoT data revolution2 and HMS has developed turn-key solutions to connect your system data with those prominent platforms and many more. Learn more here:

Ewon and Microsoft Azure                    Ewon and AWS

 

 

Related articles:

https://www.hms-networks.com/news-and-insights/blog/posts/iot-blog/2018/03/02/leveraging-the-ewon-flexy-in-iiot-applications

https://www.hms-networks.com/news-and-insights/blog/posts/iot-blog/2020/10/30/integrating-ot-data-into-anycloud

 

Additional Resources:

https://developer.ewon.biz/content/dmweb-api

https://developer.ewon.biz/content/m2web-api-0

https://www.restapitutorial.com/

https://letstacle.com/what-does-api-stand-for-understanding-api