On the second episode of the Entrepreneurial Open Source Podcast, Thabang and I talked to Glenn Ergeerts and Frank Gielissen of Aloxy, an industrial IoT (IIoT) startup based in Antwerp.
Aloxy specializes in the chemical and oil and gas industries, building infrastructure sensors that monitor the positions of critical valves and send the data back to the Aloxy IIoT Hub for processing and analysis. But before finding a niche within IIoT, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer Glenn Ergeerts was working on an open source wireless communications stack at the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre and University of Antwerp.
When applying the technology to different projects, Glenn says they noticed the petro-chemical industry was being driven towards IoT. With collaboration from co-founders with a background in this industry, they were able to identify a market opportunity.
“There was a gap in the industry, and we saw there was an opportunity to apply low-power wide-area network technology around valve positioning,” says Frank Gielissen, Aloxy’s chief commercial officer.
Aloxy’s membership in the Eclipse Foundation was born out of technical needs. Joining the Eclipse IoT Working Group and working on Eclipse Hono and Eclipse Ditto allowed them to build infrastructure components that let customers keep their data on-premises. However, Frank and Glenn say participation in an open source community has also been beneficial to Aloxy’s developers, who believe in open source and participating in these projects.
Frank and Glenn also discussed how open source participation is helping them drive brand awareness and discover opportunities for industrial collaboration. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google.
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