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Commercial Equipment
Blues gives commercial equipment manufacturers a faster, simpler way to retrofit or build smart connected products that generate new revenue, reduce support costs, and deliver better customer experiences.
Challenges Commercial Equipment Manufacturers Face Creating Smart Connected Products
Manufacturers want to differentiate their equipment, deliver better customer experiences, and unlock new revenue streams. Doing so means surmounting obstacles specific to the Commercial Equipment sector, including connectivity challenges, digital security, customization and durability.
Unreliable Connectivity
Industrial and commercial settings can be messy. Your equipment can be installed in basements, factories, rooftops, metal enclosures, moving vehicles, or rural locations – places where one type of connectivity might not consistently work. When connectivity is unreliable, it can be a struggle to deliver the full value potential of a connected product.
Digital Security is a New Challenge
Many Commercial Equipment Manufacturers have never had to ensure the online security of their products. Unfortunately, it’s easy to expose serious vulnerabilities when you’re doing things for the first time. Making sure your product is safe isn’t just about protecting your business, it’s about protecting your customers, too.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
Building commercial equipment is different from making a mass market consumer product. Commercial customers frequently require products to be customized to their specific needs. Customization can be on an install-by-install or geographic basis. Your connected product not only has to support this degree of customization, but you also need to be able to easily manage your deployed fleet across all these customizations.
Commercial Durability
Commercial products are assets with depreciation schedules, expected to last for years, or even decades. When connecting commercial equipment, it’s vital to ensure that the product’s connected value proposition is as durable as the underlying physical product. The technology you use to make your product smart and connected needs to be flexible, adaptable, and future-proofed.
How Blues Helps Commercial Equipment Manufacturers Succeed
With Blues, manufacturers can skip years of complexity, cost, and risk that derail efforts to build or retrofit smart connected products and focus instead on delivering a better customer experience. Blues makes building connected products easy, solving issues directly relevant to Commercial Equipment manufacturers.
Connectivity Anywhere
Blues delivers global, secure connectivity out-of-the-box for any environment. Using Blues lets you choose the best radio access technology for you and your customers’ needs. And we make it easy, with no carrier contracts to negotiate or hurdles to jump over. Your commercial equipment connects reliably from day one.
Security Built-In
Every Blues product has enterprise-grade security designed-in from day one. Data is automatically encrypted, and travels off-internet, protecting you and your customers. We take care of the hard parts like secure OTA, lifecycle firmware management, and secure fleet-wide updates.
Flexible Fleet Management:
Blues gives you full visibility of each one of your products no matter where they are deployed. We provide powerful and flexible tools for configuring products to meet your needs and your customer’s requirements. Manage product behavior device-by-device, by customer, geographically or fleet-wide. Monitor health, remotely diagnose issues, update firmware, and control costs all from a single platform, at scale.
Future-proof
Blues is architected for the long haul, with flexibility, adaptability and resilience designed in from the start. When change happens – in requirements, commercial regulations, or anything else – we let you re-work and re-deploy the implementation of your smart, connected commercial equipment with minimum effort, even when it’s already deployed in the field.
Take Your Next Step
Whether you own the business, product, tech stack (or all three!), we're ready to chat or to help you dive right in.
Use Cases
Downtime Prevention
Increase equipment uptime by remotely monitoring the condition of your connected products to spot emerging problems before they happen. Data-driven predictive maintenance prevents breakdowns that disrupt your customers' operations. Eliminate revenue loss from service calls and warranty claims while increasing customer satisfaction.
Energy Savings
Optimize energy consumption and reduce operating costs through real-time visibility into equipment performance and usage patterns. Enable automated controls that adjust to actual demand rather than running at full capacity. Help your customers lower their energy bills, meet sustainability goals, and improve their bottom line.
Safety
Assurance
Protect equipment and operators through continuous monitoring of operating conditions, automatic shut-offs, and instant alerts for safety issues. Detect hazardous conditions like overheating and pressure anomalies before they cause injuries or damage. Reduce liability, meet safety regulations, and give your customers peace of mind.
Loss
Prevention
Protect inventory with uninterrupted environmental monitoring and real-time alerts when conditions drift out of range. Detect refrigeration failures, temperature fluctuations, or humidity problems before they destroy product. Avoid costly losses that damage customer relationships and generate expensive warranty claims.
Truck Roll Reduction
Eliminate unnecessary service visits by remotely monitoring equipment performance and maintenance needs in real-time. Reduce your customers service costs, increase technician productivity, and improve customer satisfaction with perfectly timed, proactive maintenance.
Differentiate Your Products with Reliable Remote Monitoring
Equipment downtime costs your customers thousands per incident, while your shrinking service workforce struggles to keep up with demand.
Learn how leading connected commercial equipment makers are transforming these operational pressures into competitive advantages with connected products that predict failures before they happen, enable remote diagnostics, and optimize energy performance.
Why Customers Love Us
By using the Blues platform, we saved about 12 months of R&D time, getting us to market about a year sooner.
Jamie Fox
Director, Technology and CRM
I like working with Blues because it solves several very important problems for me that I no longer have to worry about.
Danny Wilson
Founder and CEO
Since integrating the Notecard. Our operational runtime is extremely high - you can almost say it's never down.
Bill Kezele
President
You could have a whole department to keep devices running—or you can hire Blues.
Rob Wurth
CEO
Blues aligns perfectly with our own mission to transform industries through cutting-edge technology.
David Mackenzie
VP of Product Development
We now forecast a 10X factor in cost savings for our smart crane system. Blues provides lower up-front costs than a traditional system.
Karen Norheim
President and CEO
Start Building Today
Get started, build your proof of concept using a Blues Starter Kit, ready-made example application, and our developer resources.
Buy a Starter Kit
Our demo kit in a box. Includes an MCU, carrier board, and pre-configured Notecard with your choice of cellular, satellite, LoRa or WiFi.
Choose an Example Application
Clone a working example—from fridge fleet monitoring to tool-usage cycle tracking —and start seeing your device data flow into Notehub.
Follow Our Getting Started Tutorial
Go from hardware setup to API calls in under an hour by following our hands-on tutorial, or join our next getting-started session live.
Take Your Next Step
Whether you own the business, product, tech stack (or all three!), we're ready to chat or to help you dive right in.
FAQs
Blues makes it easy to connect any IoT device to the cloud in minutes using our Notecard modules and Notehub platform. With just a few lines of JSON, your device can securely send data to the cloud—no complex setup or custom firmware required.
Want to know more? Contact Us for a free no obligation chat!
Our Notecard Cellular is an ultra-low-power, plug-and-play module designed for long battery life and global coverage. It includes 10 years of data and 500MB of usage with no monthly fees or contracts. Perfect for remote, embedded, or battery-operated IoT deployments.
Custom modules like the Notecard XP are also available for large scale deployments and help reduce total bill of materials by using only components your application requires.
Yes! Every Notecard includes 500MB of bundled data that's good for up to 10 years and has no contracts and no subscriptions. You get predictable pricing and complete cost control, even at scale. Visit our Pricing page to learn more.
Blues handles security for you. Notecards include built-in ECC certificates and use encrypted, off-internet communications to send data to Notehub. You don’t need to manage credentials or certificate renewal.
Blues offers a full ecosystem of Notecards for easy connectivity, and Notecarriers for easy prototyping. We also offer design support through our MinSpin program. Whether you're building a prototype or scaling to thousands of devices, Blues can help streamline the entire development lifecycle.
Yes. With Starnote, Blues enables satellite connectivity via Skylo for global fallback or primary communication. It’s fully integrated into our API and Notehub so you can switch from cellular to satellite with little or no code changes.
Yes! Our family of Notecard modules support the four main different communication modes: cellular, Wi-Fi, satellite, and LoRa. All of them use the same developer-friendly API so you can switch Notecards without needing to rewrite your application code. Some of our Notecards even support multiple communication modes like our Notecard Cell+WiFi.
With Notehub, you get built-in fleet management tools: real-time overviews, location mapping, alerts, OTA firmware updates, and device diagnostics. It works at any scale, securely and efficiently.
Through our MinSpin and Proof of Concept (PoC) programs, Blues can provide suggestions and feedback for product design, firmware consulting, and manufacturing guidance to help you go from idea to production faster and more cost-effectively.
We also have built a catalog of trusted partners who are skilled experts ready to help you build your connected devices.