The Pilot Playbook · Industrial IoT · AI-Ready
Run a Pilot That Proves the Data Is Worth Acting On
A good pilot answers one question: does this data tell us something we can act on, as fast and cheaply as possible? It is not a scaled-down version of the eventual product; it's the smallest thing that proves the bet. Here's exactly what gets connected, what gets configured, and how you'll know it worked.
Connect
Existing sensors, PLCs, legacy SCADA, gateways, or cellular modules, connected through device APIs and federation without ripping out hardware you've already deployed.
Configure
Dashboards, condition rules, and threshold alerts, set up in a no-code application rather than engineered from scratch by a team you don't have yet.
Prove it
Watch for the first time the data flags something a technician would have missed, then decide what happens next, with evidence instead of a guess.
Connect
Connect what's already on the machine
Connect equipment quickly using Murano's device APIs, gateways, and federation from existing device clouds, without replacing hardware you've already deployed. Whatever's already reporting data, or easy to add without a redesign, is the right starting point.
What device management covers
Secure provisioning and authentication
Connection and identity management
Firmware and content upload/download
Infield update / OTA capabilities
HTTP, MQTT, and Federation APIs
Customizable event handler for data integrations
Before you connect anything
One product line, not the whole fleet
Pick the equipment line where a failure is expensive, visible, or already a known pain point for your service team. That's where a pilot's results will actually mean something.
One or two failure modes you already suspect
Bearing wear, overheating, a pressure drift: whatever your service techs already talk about informally. The pilot's job is to turn that hunch into a rule that fires before the failure does.
A customer site willing to go first
Ideally one with a service relationship already, so a heads-up from the platform lands as a value-add, not a cold introduction to being monitored.
Configure
Configure the pilot instead of building it
ExoSense's no-code data pipeline and condition management workflows let your engineers encode your domain expertise as rules, transformations, and notifications, without writing a backend. Most pilots are live in weeks because there's nothing to engineer from scratch.
Rules and threshold alerts, not machine learning
A pilot answers whether the data is worth acting on at all. That's a condition rule (temperature above X for Y minutes, vibration outside a band, a signal that stops reporting), not an anomaly-detection model. Machine learning and custom AI functions are a real part of the roadmap, just not the first thing you need to prove a pilot works.
Dashboards your team (and eventually your customer) can read
A live view of the equipment's condition, built from the same signals the rules watch, so a status change is something a person can see rather than an alert buried in a log.
Notifications routed to the right place
An internal Slack channel, an email to a service manager, a work order in your existing system: configured, not custom-integrated, for a pilot's scope.
Exosite has been named in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Global Industrial IoT Platforms six times since 2019, pilots run on the same platform, not a stripped-down trial version.
Prove It
Know when it worked, and what to do next
The pilot succeeds the first time it flags something a technician wouldn't have caught otherwise, or gives your team a reporting story your sales team can use. When that happens, you have an actual answer, grounded in what the pilot showed and not a guess, about whether to expand to more equipment, more sites, or the next failure mode.
Hastings Air Energy Control took this exact path: a pilot that proved the idea, moved onto a platform built to scale it, and became a subscription their customers now ask for. Read the Hastings case study →
Once your pilot proves out, the harder question isn't technical: it's where the business value actually shows up. See the four places pilots pay off →
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does a pilot take?
Most pilots are live within weeks, not quarters, connecting existing sensors and configuring ExoSense rather than building custom software.
Do we need to replace our existing hardware or device cloud?
No. Murano connects through device APIs, gateways, and federation from existing device clouds.
Is this locked to one industry or machine type?
No. The platform is equipment- and protocol-agnostic: wireless sensors, PLCs, legacy SCADA, gateways, cellular modules, across pumps, ag, water, energy, rotating equipment, and more.
What does this cost to try?
A pilot typically runs a few thousand dollars, which includes engineering support hours to get your equipment connected and your first dashboards and rules configured, not just a software license.
Your machines already know more than you're using.
Let's find the smallest first step: the pilot that proves it, on your equipment, in weeks.