Dr. Edward Pultar is visiting one week in May. He is a former visiting scholar at UJI and founding member of Valarm.net (http://www.valarm.net/), an entirely cloud-based company managed together with his brother. How can a self-funding, bootstrapped company, manage international customers around the world? What is their business model? What is the trick? VAlarm is basically a software as a service company. Software is the main product. They sometimes sell the hardware solutions, because some customers demand a single provider to manage sw&hw together. In other cases, they create software tools, APIs and real-time dashboards for existing hardware when customers already possess their sensors. So, Valarm provides cloud-based software tools for remotely monitoring industrial IoT systems and sensors. Look at the customer stories (http://www.valarm.net/customer-stories/) for really real-life IoT deployments and successful use cases.

However, what is the trick? How has Valarm grown in terms of users but not in terms of employees and operating infrastructure. How did they create and maintain (for more than 5 years) this type of company? Valarm has no physical offices, no phone-based customer care system. Everything is managed on the cloud: cloud-based software, cloud-based checkout, cloud-based access to customer sensor measurements, etc. Not everything is cloud-based. Desire, determination and the lack of scare to fast change in technology are not barriers for Valarm. Valarm’s success demonstrates that with modest infrastructure and investment, an almost familiar company can have a niche in the competitive world of cloud-based software for IoT, which seems to be restricted to big IT players. That’s a convincing take-away message for anyone willing to launch a start-up.