Spark Works is a nascent technology company delivering advanced hardware and software products in the areas of smart devices, e-health, building automation, telecommunication data analytics, ambient intelligence and car analytics with emphasis on the driver’s behaviour. SPARKS team comprises well-trained industrial and academic researchers, combining skills and expertise in the fields of Internet of Things, eHealth, Smart Cities, Big Data, Advanced Analytics, novel telecommunication architectures such as Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Fog, V2X communication paradigms, paired with complimentary 5G Networking verticals. SPARKS’ engineers are proficient in offering high quality full stack development and service integration, already demonstrated through a diverse portfolio of successful research projects, PoCs, Hackathons, IEEE/ACM conference participation and demos, along with several SME events. The company has brought forward new ICT solutions that employ state of the art technologies developed in numerous private and EU funded projects under FP7 and H2020, while currently cooperating with partners across the EU having successfully deployed its hardware and software solutions in large public/private buildings such as schools and hospitals, maritime facilities and more recently cars and large vehicle fleets.

The major product of SPARKS, is the SparkWorks IoT Platform, an Edge Analytics platform that is providing a generic execution environment custom-tailored for low-end IoT devices. This execution environment (e.g., a virtual machine) allows the execution of code that does not need to be pre-deployed or pre-configured to the devices. The SparkWorks IoT Platform allows developers to (re-)write the code even after the deployment of the IoT infrastructure and the IoT platform automatically identifies the optimal location for executing the code based on the volume of data that is required, the location of the data, the available resources of the different components that constitute the system.

SparkWorks IoT platform delivers an environment where domain experts can focus on specifying the rules for data-driven processing and event-based response while it automatically tunes the edge and cloud infrastructure for high-performance and high-availability. The resulting systems continue to operate even when certain parts of the IoT domain become disconnected or experience periods of low-bandwidth. Data are stored locally at the edges of the network and only the parts that need to be accessible by other systems are forwarded to the cloud.

Founded with a result-driven mentality, SPARKS is challenged by the opportunity of constantly evolving its platform and performing real-world experiments, it is therefore interested to identify new research challenges and architectural swifts that will probably lead into future product features to cover the constantly increased customer demand in the most efficient manner. Especially in the era of 5G and Tactile Internet that is rapidly approaching, SPARKS intends to offer a holistic and concrete platform, thus become able to penetrate the now-shaping and extremely demanding market of IoT solutions and Advanced Analytics and claim an adequate market share for generating a substantial cash flow.