by Gary Mintchell | Jan 22, 2021 | Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
Inductive Automation’s Ignition Users Can Run AWS Infrastructure and Services On-Premises
Amazon has made some interesting moves in the manufacturing space lately. Many companies are porting their software to run on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Then in December Amazon touted its Monitron, Panorama, and Lookout at its developer conference. We can only imagine what sort of impact this company will have in the Industrial Internet of Things and Digital Transformation markets.
Especially when it entices established partners such as Inductive Automation. This week’s announcement I believe is just an initial announcement. I perceive much more potential for the two companies to work together. But then, I always see potential outcomes. This one should pay off in the future. Keep an eye out.
Inductive Automation announced January 20 that it has achieved the AWS Outposts Ready designation, part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Service Ready Program. This designation recognizes that Inductive Automation has demonstrated successful integration with AWS Outposts deployments. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.
Inductive Automation is a fast-growing industrial automation software company. Its key product, Ignition by Inductive Automation®, is used in a wide variety of industries, in more than 100 countries. Ignition is an industrial application platform with fully integrated tools for building solutions in human-machine interface (HMI), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), manufacturing execution systems (MES), and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
Achieving the AWS Outposts Ready designation differentiates Inductive Automation as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member with a product fully tested on AWS Outposts. AWS Outposts Ready products are generally available and supported for AWS customers, with clear deployment documentation for AWS Outposts. AWS Service Ready Partners have demonstrated success building products integrated with AWS services, helping AWS customers evaluate and use their technology productively, at scale and varying levels of complexity.
“Customers are looking for ways to make their production plants run more efficiently using sensors and machine learning,” said Joshua Burgin, general manager of AWS Outposts, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are delighted to welcome Inductive Automation to the AWS Outposts Ready Program. Inductive Automation can help these customers modernize their plant operations using cloud services and do it with the low latency these customers need, by running Ignition on AWS Outposts at the plant location.”
“We’re very proud to achieve AWS Service Ready status,” said Travis Cox, co-director of sales engineering for Inductive Automation. “We’re ready to help organizations achieve their technology goals by leveraging the agility, breadth of services, and constant innovation from AWS.”
To support the seamless integration and deployment of AWS Outposts Ready solutions, AWS established the AWS Outposts Ready Program to help customers identify products integrated with AWS Outposts and spend less time evaluating new tools, and more time scaling their use of products that are integrated with AWS Outpost deployments.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 22, 2021 | News, Organizations
CESMII—The Smart Manufacturing Institute has assembled a team of industry veterans energetically out building partnerships and spreading the news about its work. It’s been a bit of time since I’ve caught up with CEO John Dyck, but its momentum continues. In my mind, this initiative can be considered America’s answer to the German Industrie 4.0 initiative that has sparked so much global governmental awareness of advancing manufacturing.
This partnership brings together many industrial thought leaders if coordinated well, will advance the cause of smart manufacturing.
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and CESMII – The Smart Manufacturing Institute have agreed to a liaison to accelerate the development, adoption, and monetization of Industrial IoT (IIoT) technologies, infrastructure, and solutions to deliver transformative business value for manufacturers through digital transformation.
The adoption, at scale, of Smart Manufacturing (SM) will truly benefit from the strategic harmonization of reference architectures, testbeds, knowledge, and several key SM technologies, like the SM Innovation Platform, SM Profiles, and the SM Marketplace that these organizations bring to the table. This will help accelerate the democratization of Smart Manufacturing across all industries, including small and medium enterprises.
Joint IIC and CESMII activities include:
- Realizing solution interoperability by harmonizing technology components and other elements through coordination, collaboration, and standardization
- Aligning work in horizontal domains for adoption within vertical domains and use cases
- Delivering thought leadership/knowledge exchange through joint seminars and Ecosystem and Workforce Development activities
“Digital transformation is at the heart of the next generation of Smart Manufacturing, bringing a host of benefits,” said Wael William Diab, Chair of the IIC Liaison Working Group and Secretary of the IIC Steering Committee. “We are looking forward to collaborating with CESMII and sharing the goal of innovation to accelerate the digitalization of industry.”
Commenting on the agreement, CESMII CEO John Dyck said, “Resilient manufacturing and supply chains demand a much greater degree of data and application interoperability. CESMII is committed to democratizing Smart Manufacturing technologies and knowledge to scale innovation. This IIC partnership will help us achieve those goals, establishing standard means for data modeling, information sharing and solutions interoperability.”
The agreement with CESMII is one of many agreements made by the IIC Liaison Working Group. For a list of current liaisons, click here.
CESMII is the United States’ national institute on Smart Manufacturing, driving cultural and technological transformation and secure industrial technologies as national imperatives. By enabling frictionless movement of information – raw and contextualized data – between real-time Operations and the people and systems that create value in and across Manufacturing organizations, CESMII is ensuring the power of information and innovation is at the fingertips of everyone who touches manufacturing.
Founded in 2016, in partnership with the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), CESMII is the third institute funded by EERE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office. The Institute is accelerating Smart Manufacturing adoption through the integration of advanced sensors, data (ingestion – contextualization – modeling – analytics), platforms and controls to radically impact manufacturing performance, through measurable improvements in areas such as: quality, throughput, costs/profitability, safety, asset reliability and energy productivity. CESMII’s program and administrative home is with the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
The Industrial Internet Consortium is the world’s leading organization delivering transformative business value to organizations, industry, and society by accelerating adoption of a trustworthy internet of things. The Industrial Internet Consortium is a program of the Object Management Group (OMG). For more information visit www.iiconsortium.org.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 21, 2021 | Data Management, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
New standard in data virtualization enables organizations to support interactive analytics on the data lake by leveraging Varada ‘dynamic indexing’ technology that automatically accelerates and optimizes analytics workloads with ‘zero data ops’
Data Ops is hot right now. We have our data lakes and ponds and clouds and probably rain, but how to find, break silos, and manipulate all that stuff requires work. This company just crossed my horizon. Varada has built and released a Data Platform to help you out. Check out its press release.
Varada unveiled its data virtualization platform which helps organizations instantly monetize all of their available data with a predictable and controlled budget. Using a dynamic indexing technology, the Varada Data Platform enables data teams to balance performance and cost of queries at massive scale, without ceding control of their data to third-party vendors.
The Varada Data Platform, available today, offers advantages compared with other data virtualization tools:
- Embrace the data lake architecture, allowing organizations to retain full control of their data and avoid vendor lock-in. Because the Varada Data Platform sits atop a customer’s existing data lake, there is no need to move data or budget for additional ETLs and storage, which reduces both cost and complexity while enabling data teams to keep data secure under consistent policies.
- Offers “glass box” visibility into how workloads perform. Data teams get deep visibility into workload performance and cluster utilization. They can easily define workload priorities, business requirements and budget. Varada automatically optimizes workloads to meet those performance and budget requirements. Even without the input of data architects, Varada continuously monitors workloads to identify heavy users, hotspots, bottlenecks and other issues and, using machine learning, elastically adjusts the compute and storage cluster. Alternatively, data teams have the option to exercise fine-grained control of budgets and business requirements, so they can gain full control and flexibility.
- Applies unique “adaptive indexing” technology to effectively accelerate queries. The Varada Data Platform drastically reduces query execution time and the required compute resources. The key is Varada’s proprietary indexing technology, which breaks data across any column into nano blocks and automatically chooses the most effective index for each nano block based on the data content and structure. This unique indexing technology is what makes queries extremely fast without the need to model data or move it to optimized data platforms.
“The beta period for this product has proven two things,” said Eran Vanounou, CEO of Varada. “First, that organizations are desperate for a way to simplify data ops management while getting the cost of query acceleration under control. Second, the path we’ve chosen is striking a chord: Varada is a ‘zero data ops’ approach that eliminates data silos by serving many workloads from one platform. And because all queries will run atop the data lake, there is a single source of truth that eliminates the need to move or model data. With several dozen early users on the platform, it’s time to bring this innovative approach to a market that’s ready for it.”
Pricing and Supported Data Sources
The Varada Data Platform currently runs on AWS and supports reserved, on-demand and spot instances. Pricing is per-node, based on a predefined scaling group. The Varada Data Platform is available on AWS Marketplace with integrated billing through AWS, or via AMI (Amazon Machine Image). Enterprise support is also available from Varada.
The platform supports a wide range of data sources and formats, including:
- Data Formats: ORC, Parquet, JSON, CSV and more
- Data Catalogs: Hive Metastore, AWS Glue
- Additional Data Sources: PostgreSQL, MySQL and more
Coming soon are support for GCP and Azure.
About Varada
The Varada mission is to enable data practitioners to go beyond the traditional limitations imposed by data infrastructure and instead zero in on the data and answers they need—with complete control over performance, cost and flexibility. In Varada’s world of big data, every query can find its optimal plan, with no prior preparation and no bottlenecks, providing consistent performance at a petabyte scale. Varada was founded by veterans of the Dell EMC XtremIO core team and is dedicated to leveraging the data lake architecture to take on the challenge of data and business agility. Varada has been recognized in the Cool Vendors in Data Management report by Gartner Inc.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 20, 2021 | Commentary, News
Short answer: I haven’t a clue.
And if anyone tells you that they do, rest assured they are just guessing.
I just took a break to watch the pomp and circumstance of swearing in a new President of the United States. A continuous tradition of 220 years of peacefully transferring power from one man to the next. Maybe someday while I still live we can make the pronoun general instead of gender specific. But, we now have a new guy.
I have written a column for an Italian magazine, Automazione Oggi, for many years. They asked me four years ago to devote a column to what Donald Trump might mean for manufacturing. My current column there contains a few thoughts about Joe Biden. The problem with these pieces is really two-fold. First, I don’t prognosticate. I’m not a soothsayer or fortune teller. As Yogi Berra supposedly said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Second, almost no politician knows anything about manufacturing other than a few statistics they are fed. Same with technology. I think Obama tried to be tech savvy, but he wasn’t. Trump was a real estate guy and TV star.
However, the US government has promoted some good things about technology and manufacturing. Just not as focused as, say, Germany’s Industrie 4.0 initiative. That has huge backing within the country. I have on my shelf The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop. The US Defense Department DARPA unleashed most of the technologies that we still use in technology.
Under the Obama administration, the Department of Energy initiated a number of manufacturing projects one of which became CESMII-The Smart Manufacturing Institute headed by my old friend John Dyck and staffed by a number of people I’ve worked with over the years.
Biden has many problems on his plate. I don’t think manufacturing came up very often in the campaigns. Some effort has been made to bring more actual manufacturing to the US. I don’t expect an emphasis, but I do expect some continuing attention to that issue. CESMII is making progress. If you are looking for a US response, I’d both pay attention to what it’s doing and also see where you can help.
Heck, I’m impressed when I find even a half-way knowledgeable discussion of manufacturing in the national media. I guess they all worked as interns on Wall Street rather than (like me) worked in manufacturing to help fund college.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 19, 2021 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Standards
Free Step-by-step Wizard Creates RFP Content to Jumpstart IIoT Projects
Two problems consistently present themselves for open, collaborative, and even open-source projects to gain wide adoption. The specifications must be adopted as a corporate standard. The buying authorities, whether corporate or plant, must define the specification as part of the bid package.
Each of these is a hurdle. The first can be overcome by including as many end user corporations as feasible in the standards development process. The second can be a major roadblock, especially if the purchasing authority is decentralized and perhaps not technically aware and more apt to be influenced by the local specified supplier sales team.
Those influences make it imperative that the standards bodies make it as easy as possible to specify the standard as part of the bid package. I’ve seen failure upon failure because of this one roadblock. That makes this new toolkit from IIC that much more valuable.
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has released its IIC RFP Toolkit, a collection of best practices and online tools to help guide IIoT project managers and procurement managers and buyers through the process of procuring all the different components and resources required for a complete end-to-end IIoT solution.
“Digital Transformation (DX) projects require unique procurement skills to navigate the considerations needed when building an RFP. The procurement process for a typical IoT project is quite different from that of an enterprise software project,” said Dirk Slama, Director of the Co-innovation Hub at Ferdinand-Steinbeis-Institute.
“This IIC toolkit helps IIoT project managers and procurement managers/buyers through the process of procuring all the different components and resources required for a complete end-to-end IIoT solution. The RFP wizard helps users create and manage effective RFPs for IIoT solutions, helping to ensure that users of IIoT technology are using the right partners and getting the best possible IIoT solution for the most affordable price,” said Transforma Insights Founding Partner Jim Morrish.
The IIC RFP Toolkit is comprised of six modules, developed by the IIC member ecosystem of IIoT technology users, vendors, and consultants. These modules are:
- Challenges, risks, and mitigation
- Project planning
- RFP creation
- RFP wizard
- RFP distribution and vendor selection
- Expert advice and discussion
“As companies struggle to ensure they are successfully setting up their digital transformation projects it becomes more important to see what the rest of the market is doing and that’s exactly what we’ve provided with the IIC RFP Toolkit. Our ecosystem of members, from across the IIoT landscape, provide insights and lessons they learnt from their own projects and created the modules in the RFP Toolkit. The IIC ecosystem is unparalleled in its ability to crowdsource solutions and share best practices to solve IIoT and digital transformation challenges,” said IGnPower Executive Vice President Bassam Zarkout.
The IIC RFP Toolkit is accessible for free on the IIC Resource Hub, a central repository for the collective resources of the IIC community. Conversations about common challenges and crowd-sourced answers from IIC members can be found on the IIC Community Forum, the space for industry experts to exchange ideas, to discuss Industrial IoT (IIoT) problems in need of solutions and to network.
