Finally, after the hottest summer in the last ten years, we had a calm cool autumn month. Looks like business activity is inversely proportional to temperature — as the temperature goes down, flespi becomes more and more popular :). In September we had a 12% growth in our users' database and exceeded the threshold of 100 000 devices registered on the platform. And nobody even knows the number of unregistered devices connecting to BI and GPS tracking platforms via flespi on a channel/gateway level as we don’t count them.
- We managed to finish September with the exact four nines 99.99% uptime. Most of the counted downtime was due to a couple of BGP related outages at NL-IX. Actually, most of our users might not have been affected but our automatic system detected connectivity problem to the platform from a couple of locations and thus we counted it as downtime.
- One of our most noticeable achievements in September is the proxy protocol with special source traffic viewer in Toolbox. These things are of special attention for those who want more information about the source TCP traffic between devices and platforms. Note that it can be any device and any platform, as the channel transparently proxies data streams between multiple locations. Some of the interesting cases that we tried included experimenting with Queclink and Concox devices to transparently connect them to several GPS tracking platforms and at the same time connect as a non-mandatory target to a flespi channel to perform remote device management with the flespi configurator tool. Worked like a charm!
- We also introduced a new communication channel between flespi engineers and platform users — a built-in chat. As you know, engineers like to concentrate on their work, that’s why we are solving the problems of our users via this chat extremely fast. Please look at the faces that are behind the names of folks chatting with you, talk with us if you have any issues or proposals and feel the dark power of telematics!
- As you may know, about a year ago flespi started implementation of own MQTT broker. A few months later MQTT 5.0 protocol was finally released and the flespi broker was the first on the market to support this version of MQTT protocol. But having it on the backend is not enough for us, we need full features of MQTT 5.0 on the frontend. That’s why we took mqtt.js open source library and contributed the whole stack of 5.0 protocol features into it. And finally this September our pull request was accepted and merged into master. It means that now anybody can easily use the whole new MQTT 5.0 protocol in javascript applications and benefit from its capabilities.
- Going further with MQTT we already have some special features of our broker and plan to extend this list soon. For example, as MQTT 5.0 introduces custom properties for messages; we are thinking of applying special filters or data conversion schemes in subscriptions when payload comes in JSON. This should bring a whole new range of possibilities for developers.
- In September we showed up on the MWCA exhibition in Los Angeles and in October we will visit GITEX in Dubai. You are welcome to come and speak to us directly. We particularly love technical persons — there’s a 99.9% chance that we will find a common topic for discussion.
We shifted to October a couple of planned features from September — one of them is sub-accounts management possibility, which will be available only to users of our Commercial plan. We also consider extending it with OAuth2 backend capabilities to simplify most flespi-based developments. Another shifted is Tableau dashboard integration. This one is basically ready, but we need to finalize and market it, which will be done soon.
And at the end of October, we should have the pilot version of our analytics system — the one that adds to flespi backend BI power tools. It will be available in the experimental mode via API only for a few months and initially, we will work with a few of our active users to make the system capable of solving their engineering tasks.
We wish you to maximize your lead-to-customer conversion rate in October and enjoy the colors of autumn — Belarus’ most beautiful season.