Cedalo is an expert team of entrepreneurs, software engineers, and inventors providing solutions for the IoT, Industry 4.0, and Event Stream Processing. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Freiburg Germany, Cedalo is the creator of Eclipse Streamsheets and the team behind the MQTT Eclipse Mosquitto Broker.
Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
CEDALO: We are the developers of two products – Eclipse Streamsheets and Eclipse Mosquitto. Both of these products are open source projects with premium editions.
Streamsheets is a no-code application development platform that gives you a spreadsheet UI to process, visualize, connect, and control data streams. With Streamsheets you can quickly generate new applications where your standard enterprise applications are at their end or where it would be too costly to customize them. If you want to phrase it more lax: Streamsheets “connects the dots” in your IoT world.
It is a no-code platform where you can easily pull in data. Its strength is there, that the stream sheets run on a server and can easily deal with constant new arrival of data in a highly tacted fashion (“real-time data streams”). Similar to spreadsheet programs you know from your desktop, you can then create the logic of what should happen to the data. This can be a summation of cells or an aggregation over time. Netx ingredient is that it offers you superior visualization that adapts in real time based on the underlying data and logic. Like this you can easily build a dashboard for others. The only thing they need to see this dashboard is a web browser. Last, but not least, the data or results from the raw data can be published again to the outside world, databases or third-party applications.
These Streamsheets can be generated by regular business users (so-called “citizen developers”)! It is not necessary that you involve the IT department, coders, or external consulting firms to set-up, or change the Streamsheets. We think the exponentially growing number of data providers (sensors, machines, IoT capable devices) requires that non-coders can do the job. If you wish to say so this is the same revolution we have seen for spreadsheets and Lotus 1-2-3 30 years ago, now simply lifted to IoT level.
Our other product, the Mosquitto broker is one of the most popular MQTT Message Brokers and highly suitable for a broad range of application areas in the Internet of Things and beyond. It connects data sources and sinks directing data streams fast and lightweight. Since it is written in C, it easily outpasses most comparable brokers that are only written in slower languages like JavaScript or Erlang.
E.E: What’s the news for 2021 about new products?
CEDALO: We are releasing Mosquitto 2.0. Mosquitto is the by far most downloaded MQTT broker in the world. Security and administration have been at the center of this update. Up to now, it was already possible to fully wall up your Mosquitto(s), but a lot of users and admins did not properly do that. IoT becomes ever more interesting for cyber criminals and exploits of iIoT networks become more and more frequently reported. Thus, we felt, it is important to increase the ease-of-use of Mosquitto’s administration.
With this release Mosquitto gets a dynamic security plugin. This enables you to change security settings (like Access Control Lists (ACL)) without having to reboot the broker. Also, all necessary ports are by default now closed to avoid any open loopholes for hackers.
The new Management Center (MC) for Eclipse Mosquitto allows you for the first time to administer your Mosquitto brokers in a Graphical User Interface and see the current topic trees and system loads. In the premium version of the Management Center you can also handle multiple brokers. You can furthermore automate interaction with the Management Center by our REST interface. REST is a very common technology if you want to establish interoperability between applications. Like that an external application can trigger actions in the Management Center which is very important if you run Mosquitto in a professional environment.
Next on the list is our other product Streamsheets, where version 2.2 is about to be released. Since we help users to fill the gaps they feel between their current enterprise applications we adapted the available charts to even more use cases. With Streamsheets 2.2, you can now display e.g. performance data of a machine as a gage or use a box plot to visualize QA data distributions better. In the cell logic we have added various new functions based on the feedback of the user community. The overall performance is being improved by optimization of our source code.
E.E: What are the ranges of traded products?
CEDALO: Cedalo offers software products in IoT data streams and a lightweight MQTT broker. Streamsheets which analyses real-time data, uses a no-code spreadsheet like interface to make real-time data accessible and easy to use. The use cases of Streamsheets are diverse and varied from Manufacturing to medical services.
Our second product, Mosquitto is an MQTT broker which is lightweight and uses the publish – subscribe method of carrying out messaging. Mosquitto is suitable for use on all devices from low power single board computers to full servers.
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
CEDALO: We are active from the first stage of maturity where enterprises need to gather data from devices or sensors. They can track data “in motion” up to the point where they use the insights to improve business or manufacturing processes.
With the increase in IoT applications, the need for real-time data is increasing and consequently, Event Stream Processing is becoming more mainstream. However, there is still the need to further educate potential customers on the need, use case and how it fits in with their technology and objectives.
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
CEDALO: We currently operate in the IoT and edge intelligence space which are both megatrends.
The Internet of Things is one of the main pillars of modern technology and has given rise to smart cities, smart homes and so on. It is projected by various sources that this market will grow with a CAGR between 20 and 35% at least until 2025, being now at around $200B and reaching around $950B in 2025 (Source: Grandview Research (Industrial Internet Of Things Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Component, By End-use (Manufacturing, Energy & Power, Oil & Gas, Healthcare, Logistics & Transport, Agriculture), And Segment Forecasts, 2019 – 2025)). One specific thing that will become very prominent is IoT security, up to now this is not properly addressed. With an exponentially increasing number of network participants from an exponentially increasing number of vendors it will be imperative especially for industrial players to add additional security mechanisms and layers to be on the safe side until security standards become more common for IoT.
Concerning Edge Intelligence, we see that currently there is still a big fight going on what part of the intelligence remains local and what will be remote (i.e. in the cloud). Currently, still a lot of companies are occupied with moving away from on-premise towards cloud computing. Only slowly they realize that a 100% cloud based solution will also not work. The underlying principles that advocate for edge.
E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?
CEDALO: Both our products, Streamsheets and Mosquitto are innovative however our Streamsheets solution is unique and extremely innovative in that it uses a spreadsheet interface to monitor and control real-time data without writing a line of code! It can also be applied to in numerous use cases from Industrial IoT to financial services in fraud detection.
E.E: What estimations do you have for 2021?
CEDALO: With the Covid19 pandemic, the need for real-time data monitoring increased rapidly across various industries and organizations. The demand for IoT and edge technologies will continue to increase with the number of devices connected estimated to grow to 75.44 billion by 2025. We have positioned Streamsheets and Mosquitto to meet the increasing demand from enterprises and organizations.