Could this hitherto unknown become the de-facto platform and marketplace for industrial IoT data and applications? With over 150 clients including some of the world’s leaders in manufacturing, it may be less crazy than it sounds.

The promise of IoT to leverage data in industrial and manufacturing settings is something we’ve heard about a few times already, and for good reason. Using data collected by IoT sensors to get a holistic picture of what’s going on in production in real-time seems like a perfect use case for IoT.

So, why have we not seen this materialize up to now? To make this work, data integration is key. The more IoT sources there are in a certain setting, the more the chances the data they produce will be in a variety of formats. To make that holistic picture possible, someone has to collect all that data and make sure they all make sense when put together.

Enter Zira. Zira is a data-driven industrial marketplace, launched from stealth by the team behind Lightapp, an energy and process optimization software company that works with hundreds of manufacturing plants, OEM suppliers, and utilities around the globe. Some of the names listed as Zira clients include 3M, Bimbo Bakeries, Boeing, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nikon, and Westrock.

What? That was our first thought, too. What is this Zira / Lightapp thing, who are the people behind it, and how did they get that kind of names in their clientele? Let’s take it from the start.

“Zira, which means ‘arena’ in Hebrew, is derived from our core service which brings all business members including customers, suppliers, machines, people and processes onto one platform and streamlines interactions between them,” said Guy Peer, co-founder and COO of Zira.

Read the full article on ZDNet