by Gary Mintchell | Sep 29, 2017 | Automation, Wireless
Remember the wireless sensor network “wars” from ten years ago, or so? Harry Sim left Honeywell Process to head up a new endeavor of Cypress Semiconductor to exploit these networks in a variety of different environments. I told him at the time that I thought he had a good chance for success.
Yesterday he wrote to me with an update. I thought I’d share it–partly as a positive example for you budding entrepreneurs out there.
New York City: If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere! For our company, there is a lot of truth to that phrase, since Cypress Envirosystems technology retrofits existing buildings – and New York has more buildings than any other US city.
Back in 2012, we eyed NYC from our perch in Silicon Valley…it is the largest city with the densest concentration of existing buildings, with perhaps the fiercest business competition. As the CEO of our startup company, I had a personal goal to build a strong business there – just to prove that we have what it takes to win in the toughest market.
Now, five years later, we have completed the upgrade of over 50 buildings in New York City, including schools, hospitals, universities, office buildings, and courthouses. These include iconic structures such as the majestic courthouses at Civic Center, the 65 story Deutsche Bank headquarters on Wall Street, the venerable CUNY campus in Lower Manhattan, Kings County Hospital, and K-12 schools in all five boroughs. In addition, our WPT technology is deployed at 3.5 million square feet at the Weiss and Javits Federal buildings, the tallest government buildings in the US, housing the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Social Security, Customs and Immigration, General Services Administration and other agencies.
And our pace is accelerating. In the next six months, another 31 buildings are already planned for upgrade. The NYC government has independently tested and vetted our WPT technology – and it is now included in municipal retrofit specifications (see press release from New York City DCAS Commissioner Lisett Camillo here).
Cypress Envirosystems’ solutions use patented non-invasive technologies to make existing buildings smarter, more comfortable, and more efficient with a minimum of cost and disruption (these days, it is called the Internet of Things – see MSN/Tech Republic interview here). I now have the satisfaction to know that we can make it in New York, and we play an important role to help this world class city become more efficient and sustainable.
Despite our progress however, we have barely scratched the surface of what can be done. New York City alone has over 4,000 municipal buildings, and another ten times that many in the private sector. Not to mention Chicago, LA, Philadelphia with similar building stock. The majority of them will benefit from the same unique technologies we have already deployed over the past five years – but our challenge will be to do 100 times more, and faster, over the next five years. The exciting journey continues for us…thank you for taking this moment to allow me to share our story with you.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 28, 2017 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
Two research studies have crossed my inbox recently regarding management knowledge of and actions toward Digital Transformation and the Industrial Internet of Things. Suffice to say that there is a disconnect.
Get smart: Humans have perceived for millennia the disconnect between knowing and doing. These research surveys show that even when managers acknowledge the importance of modern digital technologies they cannot get the job done.
Big Thought: Implementers have realized significant cost reductions and increased speed of product development.
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The first study was conducted by enterprise business solutions provider, HSO. It found 54% of managers in the manufacturing industry believe that their company is not effectively using predictive engineering technology, despite the technology being billed as a leading industry trend.
In an era that has been dominated by the rise of IoT and predictive analytics technology, it was also surprising to find that only 15.2% of those polled placed predictive engineering as a business priority for the next five years. In addition to this, a quarter of the 250 managers involved in the study feel that a lack of integrated technology across different departments is the main reasons that firms do not implement predictive engineering.
However, the study did reveal that more than four in ten managers in manufacturing feel that the rise of IoT technologies is crucial to help drive predictive engineering, with artificial intelligence and machine learning also being rated as important factors.
Out of the manufacturers that are using predictive engineering to help make their processes more efficient, over half (55.6%) stated that they are benefitting from significant cost reductions while 44.8% are seeing an increase in the speed of product development.
A second study by IFS, and enterprise applications provider, found lack of integration stands between companies and digital transformation benefits of IoT. According to a survey of 200 IoT decision makers at industrial companies in North America, only 16 percent of respondents consume IoT data in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. That means 84 percent of industrial companies face a disconnect between data from connected devices and strategic decision making and operations, limiting the digital transformation potential of IoT.
The study posed questions about companies’ degree of IoT sophistication. Respondents were divided into groups including IoT Leaders and IoT Laggards, depending on how well their enterprise software prepared them to consume IoT data—as well as Digital Transformation Leaders and Digital Transformation Laggards depending on how well their enterprise software prepared them for digital transformation.
The two Leaders groups overlapped, with 88 percent of Digital Transformation Leaders also qualifying as IoT Leaders, suggesting IoT is a technology that underpins the loose concept of digital transformation. Digital Transformation Leaders made more complete use of IoT data than Digital Transformation Laggards; Leaders are almost three times as likely to use IoT data for corporate business intelligence or to monitor performance against service level agreements.
Digital Transformation Leaders were more likely than Digital Transformation Laggards to be able to access IoT data in applications used beyond the plant floor. They were more than four times as likely to have access to IoT data in enterprise asset management software, twice as likely than Digital Transformation Laggards to be able to access IoT data in high-value asset performance management software, and almost twice as likely to be able to be able to use IoT data in ERP.
The data suggests a real need for more IoT-enabled enterprise applications designed to put data from networks of connected devices into the context of the business.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 27, 2017 | Automation, Standards
This article appeared in TechCrunch. It’s pretty IT oriented, but the thoughts are relevant for the OT world, too.
The author, Ron Miller, reported that Amazon’s AWS move to join an industry standard on a technology known as containers signals the importance of standards.
Get Smart: Standards develop in a number of ways. Not all of them are ISA or ISO or IEC, although these definitely have a place. An industry leader once told me, “Gary, the best industry standards are de facto standards.” These are the ones that build a critical mass among users and developers and that solve real problems.
When AWS today became a full-fledged member of the container standards body, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, it represented a significant milestone. By joining Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and just about every company that matters in the space, AWS has acknowledged that when it comes to container management, standards matter.
Does this sound familiar to the industrial automation market? AWS has been known to go the proprietary route, after all. When you’re that big and powerful, and control vast swaths of market share as AWS does, you can afford to go your own way from time to time. Containers is an area it hasn’t controlled, though. That belongs to Kubernetes, the open source container management tool originally developed inside Google.
What does it take for standards to win? Once it recognized Google’s dominance in container management, the next logical step was to join the CNCF and adhere to the same container standards the entire industry is using. Sometimes it’s better to switch than fight, and this was clearly one of those times.
The reason for standards. Standards provide a common basis for managing containers. Everyone can build their own tools on top of them. Google already has when it built Kubernetes, Red Hat has OpenShift, Microsoft makes Azure Container Service — and so forth and so on.
As for end users: Companies like standards because they know the technology is going to work a certain way, regardless of who built it. Each vendor provides a similar set of basic services, then differentiates itself based on what it builds on top.
Benefits for all: Technology tends to take off once a standard is agreed upon by the majority of the industry. Look at the World Wide Web. It has taken off because there is a standard way of building web sites. When companies agree to the building blocks, everything else seems to fall into place.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 26, 2017 | Productivity
As many of you know, I use an app called Nozbe as part of my Getting Things Done practice for personal productivity.
Several years ago I wrote about GTD and soon heard from a guy called Michael Sliwinski. He was from Poland and had written an app oriented toward David Allen’s GTD methodology. He told me about Nozbe. I was using something else but not thrilled with it. After a few months I tried Nozbe seriously and got hooked.
Michael is in the process of writing a book to complement use of his app and introduce people to productivity. I’ve read a draft of the forward of the book. In it he mentions myths of people who use productivity systems.
One myth concerns the type of people who use a system. He calls them “dweebs”. You know, those unimaginative, dull, plodding sort of people.
Truth be told, creative people are usually quite organized in their lives. They have a morning routine (usually write or draw first then exercise; executives work out first as a general rule) and like organization and regularity.
I’m a writer. I find that having a productivity system allows me to focus on one thing at a time and get it done. There are things that interfere, but I can always start my day off on the right foot.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 26, 2017 | Automation, Security
Inductive Automation included a number of partner companies in its Ignition Community Conference last week in Folsom, CA. Among these companies was Bedrock Automation. I’ve written about Bedrock before a few times. This trip I was looking at its display when its CEO in disguise appeared.
Why it matters: Cyber security is at the top of everyone’s mind these days. Bedrock Automation has designed a system to be secure from all parts of the supply chain.
Albert Rooyakkers, founder/CEO/CTO, was wearing a hat and sunglasses and I walked right past him. However, he came over and gave me his usual high energy explanation of the entire Bedrock system.
Bedrock Automation builds an industrial control system (PLC) that was designed from the beginning with security in mind. Not just cyber security, but also security from tampering, lightning, high-energy electromagnetic interference, and more.
Intrinsic Security begins with Strong Cryptography, then adds Secure Components, Component Anti Tamper, Secure Firmware, Secure Communications, and Module Anti Tamper.
The metal construction showcases the secure construction, just as does the design of the I/O modules and communication with the controller (no insecure backplane).
Public Key Infrastructure
Rooyakkers always gives me the deep dive into Public Key Infrastructure which leads to Hardware Root of Trust—the essential element of security in the product.
Use of asymmetric cryptography for authentication and key exchange is the basis of secure e-commerce. In the internet context, there is a critical additional piece, a root of trust at the center of an exchange. This is called Certificate Authority. Key pairs, certificates, a root of trust and interoperable algorithms together form a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) which includes the infrastructure and policies to manage and maintain the trust. Some of the building blocks include:
• Signatures
• Transport Layer Security
• X.509 Certificates
• Certificate Chain of Trust
• Root Certificate Authority
Until now PKI has not been implemented in industrial control systems. Bedrock Automation embeds the Hardware Root of Trust in the control system. It is designed from the ground up with security in mind.
Bedrock Automation has always gone to market with systems integrators—a strategy that fits with Inductive Automation. In many remote control and SCADA systems, the two form a perfect pair.
