In 1886, Robert Bosch founded ‘The Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering’, and more than 135 years later, Bosch isn’t just ahead of its time, it’s actively defining the future of the world we live in. You probably know Bosch for its consumer goods, but it also develops innovative solutions for industry, mobility, and has a comprehensive expertise in the Internet of Things (IoT), gathered in its division and particularly in Bosch Digital.

While many people associate IoT with the ‘smart home’, it refers to the processing ability, software and technologies that connect and exchange data over the Internet. Bosch IoT Insights is in the business of collecting that data and making it actionable, helping engineers and developers to solve problems, design better solutions, and innovate at scale.

Take Bosch Digital's Bosch IoT Insights software service for aircraft manufacturers for example. It captures and transmits data from power tools used to tighten the six million screws, nuts, and bolts on an airplane — a mission-critical job with no room for error. If the torque or angle of a screw is even slightly out of alignment, the app sends an alert to the operator who can fix it. Bosch Digital's Bosch IoT Insights can also manage maintenance schedules and create an audit trail for regulators across many industries including Retail, Automotive, Aerospace, Energy and Agriculture.

Another exciting area that Bosch IoT Insights is involved in is engine control unit (ECU) development for cars. Steffen Gürtler, Senior Expert of IoT Data Management at Bosch Digital reveals, “data can help us understand customers and the market better. ECUs capture insights about how the driver interacts with the car, and this data is anonymized and shared securely with our developers so they can better understand how the ECU behaves in real-world situations.”

That means Bosch Digital developers can take innovation out of the laboratory and really understand how they can optimize products when they run simulations — something Gürtler describes as “learning the reality about reality.”

Bosch Digital implemented MongoDB to store, manage and analyze data in real time. “With solutions such as object storage you have to laboriously pull data every time you want to analyze it, which takes time and money,“ explains Gürtler. “MongoDB can manage huge amounts of data, create a unified view from multiple data sources, and make it accessible immediately. We can perform live analysis very efficiently and it’s superfast to parse.”

The solution is ideally suited for managing complex data types, such as IoT data, which arrives at higher speeds, greater volumes, and in more variable structures than other types of data. MongoDB can handle structured, semi structured, and unstructured data, and efficient data modeling with JSON makes it easy to map the information model of each device to its associated document in the database.

MongoDB’s dynamic schemas support agile, iterative development methodologies and makes it simple to evolve apps and software. Adding new devices, sensors and assets is easy, which means the team can focus on creating better software, rather than spending time dealing with mismatches between programming language and the database.

Gürtler’s team proactively manages the service to make sure customers can get the results they need from Bosch IoT Insights. For example, they provide support around how to run SQL queries in MongoDB, how to search effectively, and if customer queries start running slowly, the team can simply index the data to get it back up to speed.

In fact, MongoDB’s rich indexing and querying capabilities — such as secondary, geospatial and text search indexes — the Aggregation Framework, and native MapReduce allow users to ask complex questions to uncover more insights in real time.

“MongoDB is a great long-term partner. The company takes the time to listen to customer feedback and fix common issues with the next release. We also get support directly from the team when we need it,” comments Gürtler. “We collaborate with Microsoft Azure and will be migrating customer data there soon, so having a database that can be hosted on multiple clouds is really useful. Microsoft Azure has a lot of ready-to-use services that will prove valuable to our business.”

In the future, the team is looking forward to rolling out Time Series Collections, which they’re currently managing manually. The feature will give them greater flexibility and higher performance when it comes to arranging data points in a sequence that demonstrates changes over time.

Steffen Gürtler, Senior Expert of IoT Data Management, Bosch Digital

With MongoDB, Bosch IoT Insights can help customers to make better sense of big data quickly and easily, whatever the use case.

“MongoDB supports what we do really well. We don’t have to coordinate schemas with anyone. Projects automatically define which data structure they need, and the platform has the agility to deliver it,” says Gürtler. The flexibility of the platform also means that data structures can be changed over time, so customers always benefit from the optimum structure for their needs. This means they can also test data and see how it behaves in queries before committing to a structure.

As machine learning and artificial intelligence become increasingly popular, Bosch Digital and its customers can use their enormous volumes of data to become more predictive and make smarter decisions based on facts. “We don’t do anything theoretical at Bosch Digital, and with MongoDB we can keep building on past experience. We don’t have to start from scratch, which means we can innovate much faster with less effort,“ reveals Gürtler.

With enterprise-grade availability and scalability coupled with zero downtime, high levels of security, and cost-effective scaling, Bosch Digital is ready to unlock new revenue streams and optimize products and services without investing more or causing complexity for its development teams.

“The use cases of big data are limitless, and MongoDB makes every single one of those possible,” concludes Gürtler.

Steffen Gürtler, Senior Expert of IoT Data Management, Bosch Digital