The Future of Farming with Internet of Things

The Future of Farming with Internet of Things

We need to feed an ever increasing global population. One major problem concerns loss of good farmland to urban development.

AeroFarms is an agriculture start up leveraging the latest of ag science along with technologies such as Internet of Things with Dell Technologies IoT platform to help solve a big problem.

The company president presented at the IQT Day event. It’s a powerful example of using technology to do good for the world. Here is a link to a video interview.  You’ll have to scroll down when you get to the page. Worth three minutes of your time–followed by an hour of thinking about using your engineering talents to solve big problems.

 

The Future of Farming with Internet of Things

Dell Technologies Unveils New IoT Strategy, Division and Solutions to Accelerate Customer Adoption

Dell Technologies has moved its Internet of Things initiative from what was almost a “skunk works” group to division status. Michael Dell, CEO, Jeremy Burton, CMO, and Ray O’Farrell, VMware CTO and GM of the new division all spoke to a large group of international journalists, analysts, and influencers Tuesday October 10 to unveil the new division and a host of other news.

Since the “things” of the Internet of Things are generally smart, Dell Technologies dubbed the new initiative as IQT or the IQ of Things.

[Dell Technologies provides transportation and a room for me to attend its events and sometimes compensates me for some of the interviews and writing I do. However, what I write and say is purely mine.]

Takeaway: Dell is seriously approaching manufacturing along with other industries in its IoT push. It approaches the great IT/OT divide from the IT side of things rather than my usual sources who are from the OT side.

Dell introduced me to its IoT work about two years ago. I’ve watched the group grow. Then came the mega-acquisition/merger between Dell and EMC forming Dell Technologies. Read the press release below and the bulleted highlights carefully and notice that the merger is well along in optimization. Often these mergers consume management time for years. In this case, a mere year has passed and much integration has been accomplished.

By the way, Dell set up a “Newsdesk” before the event where they interviewed the six Influencers invited. Here is a link to my interview. Others included Bob Egan, William McCabe (who interestingly enough had just spent time in my hometown of Jackson Center, Ohio–how’s that for weird), Eric Vanderburg, Tamara McCleary, and Dan Newman.

News summary

  • New IoT Era Heralds Return to ‘Distributed Computing’
  • New “Distributed Core” computing model the basis of IoT strategy
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology to work in concert with IoT infrastructure to deliver smarter, more predictive systems
  • New Dell Technologies IoT Division to orchestrate development of products and services across Dell Technologies.
  • New IoT specific products, labs and partner program help customers speed implementation of IoT projects
  • Dell Technologies to invest $1B in IoT R&D over next three years

Rather than the usual marketing speak of a press release, this one is well crafted. So, I present to you the full press release from Dell Technologies diving into the announcements

Full story

Dell Technologies today unveiled its Internet of Things (IoT) vision and strategy, a new IoT division as well as new IoT specific products, labs, partner program and consumption models. The announcement underscores Dell Technologies commitment to helping customers realize their digital future by safely navigating the complex and often fragmented IoT landscape.

IoT, a New Distributed Model for Computing

As more and more customers look to digitally transform their business, a new model of computing is emerging. For the last 15 years the IT industry has seen the rise of Cloud Computing, a highly centralized model for delivering IT services. But in an age where every type of device, from phones to cars to oil rigs to robots to heart monitors are alive and intelligent, there is a requirement for a “distributed core” focused on real time processing of information. These devices simply cannot wait for a response from centralized cloud infrastructure that may be ‘seconds’ away.

“IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organizations operate and how the world works” said Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies. “Dell Technologies is leading the way for our customers with a new distributed computing architecture that brings IoT and artificial intelligence together in one, interdependent ecosystem from the edge to the core to the cloud. The implications for our global society will be nothing short of profound.”

Customers have expressed a growing need for one company to pull together complete IoT solutions that can be deployed within their organizations. Dell Technologies’ comprehensive approach to IoT is based on leading technology and services and a carefully curated partner ecosystem designed to realize value for customers today and prepare them for the future.

New Dell Technologies IoT Division

The company’s new IoT Division will be led by VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell, and is chartered with orchestrating the development of IoT products and services across the Dell Technologies family. The IoT Solutions Division will combine internally developed technologies with offerings from the vast Dell Technologies ecosystem to deliver complete solutions for the customer.

“Dell Technologies has long seen the opportunity within the rapidly growing world of IoT, given its rich history in the edge computing market” explained Ray O’Farrell, VMware EVP & CTO, and general manager for Dell Technologies IoT division. “Our new IoT Division will leverage the strength across all of Dell Technologies family of businesses to ensure we deliver the right solution – in combination with our vast partner ecosystem – to meet customer needs and help them deploy integrated IoT systems with greater ease.”

Organic Investments in our IoT Future – Products, Labs, Partner Program

Over the next three years, Dell Technologies is investing $1B in new IoT products, solutions, labs, partner program and ecosystem.

Today Dell Technologies already provides Edge Gateways, which can be secured and managed by VMware Pulse IoT Control Center.  Dell EMC PowerEdge C-Series servers have been enhanced for batch training and machine learning as a part of the distributed core. Dell EMC Isilon and Elastic Cloud Storage provide file and object storage for massive amounts of data and enable analytics through HDFS. Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and Pivotal Container Service (PKS) provide an ideal platform for developing new cloud-based analytics applications. Virtustream’s PCF Service provides a managed Pivotal Cloud Foundry Service simplifying the deployment and operation of mission-critical cloud architected workloads in Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, while Virtustream Storage Cloud is available for off-premises cloud object storage. Finally, Dell Boomi rapidly connects relevant data to enhance cloud-based analytics and deep learning.

New product development initiatives include:

  • Dell EMC ‘Project Nautilus’: Software that enables the ingestion and querying of data streams from IoT gateways in real time. Data can subsequently be archived to file or object storage for deeper advanced analytics;
  • ‘Project Fire’: a hyper converged platform part of the VMware Pulse family of IoT solutions that includes simplified management, local compute, storage and IoT applications such as real-time analytics. ‘Project Fire’ enables businesses to roll-out IoT use cases faster and have consistent infrastructure software from edge to core to cloud;
  • RSA ‘Project IRIS’: Currently under development in RSA Labs, Iris extends the Security Analytics capability to provide threat visibility and monitoring right out to the edge;
  • Disruptive technologies like processor accelerators will increase the velocity of analytics closer to the edge. Collaboration with industry leaders like VMware, Intel and NVIDIA and the Dell Technologies Capital investment in Graphcore reflect opportunities to optimize servers for AI, machine learning and deep learning performance.
  • Project ‘Worldwide Herd’: for performing analytics on geographically dispersed data – increasingly important to enable deep learning on datasets that cannot be moved for reasons of size, privacy and regulatory concern.

Customers can also now visit one of the newly designed Dell Technologies IoT Labs.

New IoT services initiatives include:

  • IoT Vision Workshop – identifies and prioritizes high-value business use cases for IoT data – essentially how and where to deploy IoT analytics that drive business.
  • IoT Technology Advisory – develops the overall IoT architecture and roadmap for implementation.

In addition, with the core focus on technology and services, Dell Technologies’ strategy is to grow the IoT footprint via a strong partner program and ecosystem.

  • Dell’s award-winning IoT Solutions Partner Programis a carefully curated, multi-tiered program comprising more than 90 partners from enterprises like Intel, Microsoft and SAP to start-ups like Action Point, IMS Evolve, FogHorn and Zingbox.
  • The program will now support partners across all Dell Technologies businesses, allowing for easier collaboration and implementation of blueprints.
  • An example of the partner ecosystem at work is the recent announcementthat VMware and SAP are collaborating to create an integrated solution for IoT analytics and vertical applications. The solution utilizes VMware Pulse IoT Center, SAP Cloud Platform and SAP Leonardo and is designed to help customers roll out IoT use cases faster and scale more easily.

Dell Technologies continues the commitment to openness and standardization in IoT by participation in efforts such as EdgeX Foundry, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the OpenFog Consortium. Seeded by Dell source code, EdgeX Foundry is a vendor-neutral open source project building a common interoperability framework to facilitate an ecosystem for edge computing. Since launching in April 2017, EdgeX Foundry has grown to more than 60 member organizations. Recently the project announced its first major milestone with the ‘Barcelona’ code release, as well as an alliance with the IIC to collaborate on testbeds.

IoT is creating new revenue models for customers and, in turn, Dell Technologies is offering new financing options to support those customers. In particular, Dell Technologies provides cloud-like payment options through Dell Financial Services flexible consumption models. These payment solutions are available across the Dell Technologies family of business and allow customers flexibility in technology acquisition and consumption.

Investments in IoT Future through Dell Technologies Capital

Dell Technologies Capital, the venture arm of Dell Technologies, is partnering closely with the new IoT division, providing industry insight and relationships to support its strategic agenda. Through its investments in promising startups and founders, Dell Technologies Capital provides a valuable link to the external innovation ecosystem, effectively accelerating the development and deployment of new IoT, AI and ML technologies and solutions. Dell Technologies Capital will be showcasing some of these startups and investments at the company’s New York IQT event, including:

  • Edico Genome, creator of world’s first processor designed to analyze next-generation sequencing data
  • FogHorn Systems, a leading developer of edge-device intelligence software for IoT solutions
  • Graphcore, a developer of next-generation processors optimized to accelerate AI-solutions
  • Moogsoft, a market leader in applying Artificial Intelligence to IT Ops (AIOps)
  • Zingbox, a developer of IoT security solutions to enable the Internet of Trusted Things

Dell Technologies family consists of the following brands: Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream and VMware.

Schneider Electric Foxboro Products Offer Enhanced Visibility Into Plant Profitability

Schneider Electric Foxboro Products Offer Enhanced Visibility Into Plant Profitability

Using technology to help plant managers and plant teams make their plants more profitable. In fact, they can even track and prove their profitability enhancements.

The Foxboro User Group met this week in Foxborough, MA at the company headquarters. Aside from the opportunity to meet with a number of company executives for in-depth discussions, there were two significant news releases. And, by the way, Foxboro claims a 100% return on investment with its new DCS in less than a year.

Why it’s important: This signals the culmination of a lot of strategic thinking at Foxboro about helping operators and others in a plant make decisions based on profitability as well as operating parameters.

First the new DCS.

Schneider Electric has improved the capabilities of its EcoStruxure Foxboro DCS, the company’s flagship distributed control system. EcoStruxure is Schneider Electric’s IoT-enabled, open and interoperable system architecture and platform.

With patented, customizable real-time accounting (RTA) models built in, the EcoStruxure Foxboro DCS not only allows the industrial workforce to evaluate the real-time financial performance of an industrial operation directly at the equipment asset level, it also empowers them to more easily identify the impact their actions and decisions have on the profitability of the operations they control. The RTA models can be manipulated and adapted to suit a variety of industrial operations across multiple segments, enabling a wide range of customers to reap far more value from their existing systems.

“For the most part, by the time business managers receive their monthly updates from whatever enterprise resource planning systems they use, the information is no longer relevant to the operational business decisions they need to make, or should have made,” said Peter Martin, vice president, Innovation and Marketing, Process Automation, Schneider Electric. “The EcoStruxure Foxboro DCS breaks the mold because our RTA models help control value asset to asset, all the way up the enterprise. By aligning process control with the hierarchy of the plant, we can provide far more visibility into the financial performance of every plant asset and asset set. That allows plant personnel to understand the impact their decisions have on the business and business leaders to understand the impact their decisions have on the operation, in real time.”

Along with the RTA models, the continuously current EcoStruxure Foxboro DCS features high-capacity, high-availability control processors; more powerful, fit-for-purpose I/O; intuitive, role-based engineering tools; and enterprise-wide analytical tools and capabilities. Additionally, its hardened cybersecure design and secure integration with the company’s market-leading Triconex safety systems protect the facility’s critical assets and allow for continuous production. Moreover, its automated, enterprise-wide, real-time condition monitoring and predictive maintenance capabilities minimize unplanned shutdowns, maximize uptime and lower maintenance costs by 30 percent or more.

EcoStruxure Foxboro DCS works in tandem with EcoStruxure Profit Advisor, Schneider Electric’s new software solution that applies the company’s RTA models to help the industrial workforce diagnose and analyze the profitability of processes throughout the plant. Whereas EcoStruxure Profit Advisor connects to any process historian to mine both historical and real-time data, the EcoStruxure Foxboro DCS takes the next step by building the algorithms into the process controllers themselves, thereby extending real-time accounting capabilities to every point in the process.

Maintenance Advisor

Of great interest to maintenance and reliability organizations, but also plant managers, is the improved Maintenance Advisor and Condition Advisor. Working in tandem, these bring information from the field relative to the condition of assets. This information can be used for information or integrated into workflow for actions.

The company’s new EcoStruxure Maintenance Advisor software, with embedded EcoStruxure Condition Advisor, bridges the gap between operations and maintenance, providing predictive maintenance and decision support for plant-wide assets.

Delivered in a single unified dashboard, EcoStruxure Maintenance Advisor monitors the real-time health of plant-wide assets to detect abnormal operating conditions. It then automatically provides actionable, easy-to-understand alerts with the proper context, along with potential reasons for the abnormal condition and possible actions to rectify it.
New EcoStruxure Condition Advisor for OPC DA enables real-time, automated condition monitoring of any OPC DA-compliant asset, such as intelligent electronic devices, motor starters and drives. This new capability complements existing Condition Advisors, which monitor the condition of Fieldbus Foundation, HART and Profibus process instruments.

 

Connecting Those Internet of Things End Devices

Connecting Those Internet of Things End Devices

Connecting things to the Internet, or to the Cloud, or whatever app. The Internet of Things is nothing without connection. Almost every piece of news or interview I’ve seen or had over the past month or two has dealt with Internet of Things platforms. Here is news from a company new to me dealing with getting legacy devices into the system.

Amir Haleem, CEO of Helium, explained the technology and products with me yesterday in relation to an announcement regarding launch of its latest product suite.

This product suite is a comprehensive low-power, long-range networking solution for IoT devices. The new offering streamlines the ability to prototype, deploy and scale a long-range wireless network that connects thousands of end devices, giving companies a simple way to intelligently and securely deliver data from device to the cloud and application layer.

The system consists of end devices called Atom that are wireless (802.15.4, but in star not mesh topology) that attach to legacy sensors and field devices typically via serial. These connect to Access Points which in turn aggregate and send data to the cloud.

“Connectivity is extraordinarily complicated when dealing with resource-constrained embedded devices,” added Haleem. “Helium has taken a process that normally takes months of labor-intensive work from a large team and simplified it to a process that can be achieved in minutes with minimal staff, and provides the visibility and control needed to manage at scale going forward.”

Automating device management and updates through a central dashboard
As companies continue to build and scale their IoT deployments, it becomes especially crucial that they ensure full control and management of their operations. Helium allows companies to manage and update their systems from a central console, the Helium Dashboard, eliminating the need to visit every sensor in the field, which is a common challenge of remote field monitoring. Helium Dashboard also serves as a central point for Helium Channels, the setup and integration of the cloud applications and data stores used to assess and take action on these physical data.

“Although there has been great progress made in the areas of IoT hardware and cloud software, there are still major technical and economic challenges in getting connectivity to the edge point to gather and deliver data,” said Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst at Quocirca. “Simplifying and lowering costs of connectivity deployment would remove a significant barrier to mass IoT adoption in several industries.”

A new economic model for deploying, managing and scaling IoT networks
Helium will simplify everything that goes into purchasing, deploying and managing a long-range, low-power IoT solution, up-ending the traditional carrier-based model, which often does not provide reliable coverage where it is needed. It’s products will work out of the box with all existing sensor hardware and a wide range of IoT cloud applications with little-to-no configuration. With hardware as low as $19 per Helium Atom module, $29 per Element Access Point, and a simple $1.99 per month per installed Atom with no usage or data fees, Helium eliminates upcharges and most add-on costs. Helium’s open standards will ensure that it will support IoT hardware and software regardless of the IoT technology companies are using today or in the future.

Key features include:
• Zero configuration for simple installation and setup at scale
• Compatibility across hundreds of hardware providers
• Extremely long range connectivity, on the order of many city-blocks in dense urban applications and hundreds of square miles in sparse rural settings
• IEEE standards-based hardware provides maximum flexibility for changing business demands with no proprietary lock-in.
• Hardware-based security to ensure data is encrypted and devices authenticated, end to end
• Over-the-air updating and bi-directional communication to provide future-proofing, up-to-date software and further protection from security risks
• Helium Channels provide interoperability with all major cloud solution providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS IoT, and Google Cloud Platform IoT Core
• Full visibility and management enabled by Helium Dashboard

Schneider Electric Foxboro Products Offer Enhanced Visibility Into Plant Profitability

Let’s Tour Dell EMS IoT Booth At Its User Conference

Dell EMS Internet of Things (IoT) group assembled a mini supply chain as its booth at the user conference Dell EMS World in Las Vegas in May. At the October Dell EMS World in Austin, these were put together as an ice cream factory and distribution, and the booth featured an ice cream machine. I sure could have used an ice cream by the time I got through all the exhibits.

The Dell IoT Gateway was the common denominator of the exhibit tying everything together.

The first station features construction. Here are a couple of guys trying out the DAQRI augmented reality helmets. I had the opportunity to try these in Hannover. A really cool application of AR.

They are looking at a combination of the construction (see the red “steel” framework) and drawings that show the layout of electrical conduit, HVAC ducting, and other details. As a construction worker, they can get a feel of where things go, as well as spot interferences the designer missed.

This station showed product on its way to market through sensing and communication from Nokia.

Below is a layout of the Emerson process manufacturing system.

They brought actual pipe, pump, motor, instruments, wirelessHART communication. No, it didn’t make ice cream.

This station featured IMS Evolve–an application that brings sensor data into the cloud and provides track and trace, as well as other analytics, assuring the safety of the food product through the supply chain from the point of view of proper temperature.

Don’t forget security! Here is a photo of a physical security video system from V5.

The Dell Gateway is an edge device capable of accumulating data from the disparate sources, performing storage and analysis at the edge then sending information to the cloud for further analysis.  It seems that everywhere I go, the “edge” is the place where innovation is centered right now. This simple demo showed the power of the edge.

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