Z Farms was facing three challenges: costly irrigation systems with water as a limited resource, narrow optimal ranges of soil moisture for growth with difficult maintenance and farm operators could not simply turn on irrigation systems like a faucet.

OnFarm needed to move quickly to capitalize on a significant "smart agriculture" opportunity to build connected applications and dashboards that captured and monitored sensors in the field and provided actionable data back to their customers. The overall solution OnFarm determined necessary was a set of "dashboard-driven connected services utilizing an IoT backend" that would accomplish several key things: • Easily collect data from incompatible sensors via wireless networks • Provide a means to integrate, analyze, and correlate different data sets of information into easily-understood and easy-to-customize reports leading to specific actionable outcomes • Manage end-user permissions, distribute reports and business intelligence through a customizable Web interface that would include dashboards, allowing custom organization of data applicable to the business employing OnFarm's suite of services