We are happy to announce that we are in the process of re-branding TeckPortal. The new brand, Senvico, represents as much of a re-branding, as it defines our new exiting vision going ahead!

Long story short

Originally TeckPortal was conceived as a generic platform for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, our experience showed that real value creation for the customer only takes place when the system is tailored precisely to the customer's needs. Thus, a generic platform was not the way ahead and specialization needed.

With the re-branding to Senvico, we underscore that our focus is on value creation for farmers. Senvico is an artificial word consisting of the words sensor, environment, and cooperation. In the logo, a leaf and radio signals can be recognized, which reflect the combination of technology and nature.

The features of the new brand design allow our target group to instantly identify what the company stands for, and what the product is about.

A wholistic approach

As part of the re-branding, we also commit to being a provider for complete solutions. Where TeckPortal was a software-only product, Senvico also understands the need for consultancy, hardware installations and maintenance services. With Senvico we strive to be a farmers IoT one-stop-shop.

Why we chose agriculture

When we realised that we had to integrate specialised business expertise into our product, the question of which industry to choose, naturally arose. Having started as a generic platform, we got the opportunity to speak to potential customers from all kinds of fields and we got a broad set of ideas to choose from. So, it became clear to us that urban use cases (smart parking, smart water meters, etc.) are quite competitive. There are many players and many competing technologies.

LoRa, in our opinion, is best used in remote areas. Unfortunately, agriculture is hard. The specific knowledge that is needed can not easily be acquired. Maybe that is why there are not that many competitors. As a company, this is definitely a step out of our comfort zone too. Nevertheless, our discussions with farmers showed it is possible and people are ready to help. We love hard problems after all!

The harder the climb, the better the view - Unknown

Haven't we all been there? =)

Why needed to specialise, in depth

LoRaWAN is an amazing technology that we discovered a few years ago and wanted work with. Our first idea was to build a generic IoT platform for our city Kirchheim unter Teck (hence the name). Since TeckPortal was targeting the common citizen, the platform was designed to be simple, hiding unnecessary details and reducing complexity by pre-configuring LoRa-specific settings. Something that was (and may still) not be on the market.

However, as we spoke to people, did pilot projects and learned our lessons, we realised the following: Our generic, but simplified platform, turned out to be too generic for the end-customer while, at the same time, being too simple for the engineering customers.

Let me explain, end-customers have particular use cases in mind, which require very specific business expertise. For example, pharma customers need special traceability of records so that any change can be tracked. Building management companies need interfaces to existing software they use. And agricultural uses-cases are not satisfied with just visualisation of data. Their data needs to evaluated automatically through algorithms specific to their niche. So, whereas simplicity is good, generalism isn't (in this case).

On the other hand, companies that specialise in precisely such use-cases, companies who have the technical expertise, such companies don't want a simple platform. They want to build their solution on top of a powerful platform where everything is configurable.

So, with TeckPortal, we maneuvered into a blind spot. Given the complexity of a generic platform, we decided to specialise.