Let’s talk augmented reality and Internet of Things (IoT) today.

The first day of Hannover Fair began with much buzz about the Dell / Linux Foundation announcement (see yesterday’s post) about the open source “unify the IoT” project. But that buzz died off after people digested the news and determined that for the time being it was not going to disrupt the industrial world.

I have only a little time between appointments today, so I’ll do a quick recap of some highlights.

OPC Foundation has brought me along to investigate and write about what’s happening with OPC UA and especially with Time Sensitive Networks (TSN).  This will not be easy–I see the OPC Foundation logo everywhere. More on this later.

I devoted much time to the Microsoft stand yesterday and again already today.  It had the “OPC wall” showing a number of products serving OPC data. Microsoft’s play is moving OPC UA to the Azure cloud. It also showed integration with Time Series Insights, a real-time data base. It also has an IoT suite and recently added IoT Central which is an SaaS application that walks customers through the process of setting up analysis and visualization of the operations data through the OPC UA connection to Azure.

Microsoft had many partners showing authentic working applications of its Hololense augmented reality product–mostly for the enhancement of service technicians including TetraPak and Thyssen Krupp among others.

SAP took me for a walk around its IoT wall. It is building a system where, if all other suppliers opt in and put all their documentation and data into the SAP cloud, then it can serve up a variety of operations and predictive information to operators and maintenance.

ABB announced a partnership with IBM Watson to help customers improve productivity.

Parker has brought all of its products into a network uniquely called Voice of the Machine–an interesting take on IoT.

There’s more, but I’m late for another appointment.

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