Building IoT Platform From Scratch 'Considerable Amount of Work'

California-based OnFarm used ThingWorx's cloud-based Internet of Things platform to develop its Web-based farm information application. This collects data from a variety of connected things, such as soil moisture sensors, and integrates it with data from other sources, such as weather information providers. It then presents the information on a customizable dashboard to its farmer customers. OnFarm CEO Lance Donny briefly considered hiring developers to build an Internet of Things platform from scratch, but the idea was quickly rejected. "That would have been a considerable amount of work. Building our own back end would have slowed us by about one or two years," he says. "We would be significantly behind if we had done that."