by Gary Mintchell | May 17, 2024 | Automation, Cloud, Data Management, Embedded Control, Manufacturing IT, Networking
While at Automate 2024 I saw Travis Cox of Inductive Automation and Benson Hougland of Opto 22. It was tough seeing them since their booth was always packed. I wound up walking through the show and out into the corridor with them.
These two companies plus Cirrus Link (MQTT and Sparkplug) are perhaps the best partnership combination I’ve seen in my years reporting in this market. Ignition running on Opto’s Groov Epic platform with MQTT and Sparkplug as the communications architecture solve many customer problems.
Hougland told me that they are continuing to build out the Groov platform. And to watch for cool things coming.
Cox told me that the big thing to pay attention to right now from Inductive Automation is the integration with Snowflake (more below). He says the integration keeps improving.
Here is Cox describing the integration at the last Ignition Community Conference:
And well, we got all the community to participate, where they’re basically leveraging Ignition or Ignition Edge or potentially have a smart device that speaks MQTT Sparkplug and they’re gonna build a data model, publish that up to a Chariot broker that’s in the cloud. Real simple. Then we can use the IoT bridge for Snowflake by Cirrus Link and all that data from Sparkplug goes directly into the Snowflake database. We’re showing it on a dashboard within Ignition, but it’s going to Snowflake database as well. And we can easily go and query that data. And we went one step further and we’re actually showing the anomaly detection within the Data Dash. So we’ll do a demonstration of this in just a moment, but wanna show you just how easy it is for this solution. And it’s all something we could do right now. It’s very, very simple to get started with this whole thing.
What is Snowflake, you may ask. Here is Pugal Janakiraman from Snowflake speaking at ICC 2024:
Snowflake is a globally connected cloud vendor agnostic data platform. It’s one single managed service from Snowflake. We take care of security, we take care of governance, we take care of scalability. And after that, much more cool, your API of choice is still SQL. You don’t have to learn hundreds of new services. You continue to use SQL as a mechanism to leverage data which is present in Snowflake, whether it is around building dashboards or you want to build an AI and ML model or build inference around those models, you still use SQL as an API for doing that.
Snowflake is a cloud-native database. Data can still reside on-premise or it can reside in whatever is your cloud vendor of choice. You can run analytics without the data movement out there. So we provide that kind of collaboration mechanisms. We provide AI and ML-based analytics. This is how the journey started for us. Ignition on Edge with zero coding using Snowpipe Streaming API, send the data to Snowflake.
by Gary Mintchell | May 14, 2024 | Cloud, Edge, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
I heard from Hannover Messe that AVEVA was launching a hybrid/cloud MES solution. Being curious, I was able to talk with Rob McGreevy, Chief Product Officer, AVEVA about this.
Why hybrid cloud MES? Today’s manufacturing is high speed/high volume, need to get closer to the edge, closer to the critical control, the machines, yet we need to move data from edge to cloud.
I get why edge, but why cloud? The reason for cloud is analytics, being able to use AI for process centerlining comparatives. We can get to predictive prescriptive quality based on hundreds of variables. Predictive usage of sustainable resources. All this becomes more feasible by connecting realtime data from the edge to the cloud.
This further information about the product comes from the press release. Software solution providers keep pushing the ball a bit further at a time.
AVEVA launches hybrid cloud
To mitigate barriers to industrial innovation, AVEVA is launching at Hannover Messe in April its new hybrid cloud Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solution that addresses the supply chain challenges by enabling manufacturing companies to fully visualize and optimize multi-site operations in the cloud.
AVEVA has expanded CONNECT, its industrial intelligence platform with data and visualization services for hybrid Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solutions.
AVEVA’s new hybrid MES solution enables manufacturing companies to manage production data in the cloud, to improve supply chain agility with enterprise-wide visibility into distributed plant operations. This enables companies to optimize their operational performance and sustainability with new insights and guidance provided by advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and data visualization.
AVEVA’s hybrid MES solution combines advanced model-driven MES capabilities at the edge with cloud-based data, analytics and visualization services available on the CONNECT industrial intelligence platform. The ability to collect and securely store data from AVEVA Manufacturing Execution System and process data sources, such as AVEVA PI System and AVEVA’s Operations Control, in a single, secure location in the cloud, makes it easier to aggregate, contextualize and securely share operational data, eliminate organizational data silos, and foster greater collaboration. This unlocks new value from the combined data sets for optimal centerlining of production equipment, soft sensors and predictions that improve quality, throughput and energy use, as well as anomaly detection that gives early insight into production losses before they occur.
by Gary Mintchell | May 13, 2024 | Business, Cloud, Data Management, Generative AI, Manufacturing IT, News
Partnering with Microsoft continues to be an important part of manufacturing software development. This news is from Hexagon partnering with Microsoft to integrate engineering with Microsoft 365 to foster data collaboration among engineers. There’s a lot of marketing overkill in the release, but the essence is they hope to improve innovation through engineers and designers using improved collaboration tools.
- Hexagon has contributed significantly to the open-source Fluid Framework data architecture that connects any manufacturing system and will integrate with Microsoft 365 creating agile, simplified workflows and productive collaboration using engineering and productivity software
- Hexagon will roll-out applications that integrate the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to empower experienced employees to be more productive and assist less skilled users
- These innovations form a significant foundation for new real-time co-engineering applications that combine Hexagon’s digital twin technologies with Microsoft Azure
Hexagon and Microsoft have partnered closely on the development and scaling of the open-source Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay service to support the real-time sharing of data across a wide range of manufacturing industry processes and systems, allowing data created in one system to be immediately available to any other person or machine operating in another. Under the new partnership, the Microsoft 365 ecosystem will plug into this data layer, enabling customers to connect their day-to-day office documents and processes with manufacturing tools. This gives teams the freedom to innovate with the tools they already use; for example, tooling cost data from a Microsoft Excel worksheet could be easily shared with a CAM programmer, so simplifying work practices and decision-making between roles.
Microsoft Teams calls can become interactive working sessions, with CAD, simulations or metrology point clouds seamlessly visualised from the source data to allow on-the-spot collaboration and fast, iterative teamwork across disparate engineering and manufacturing functions. Hexagon has already demonstrated this capability in its 3D Whiteboard Nexus tool, which is also now available as an native app in Teams.
Hexagon is working with Microsoft to integrate generative AI models into its manufacturing software, helping users to make better use of their capabilities and analysing existing datasets to learn and suggest the best practices for achieving desired outputs. These AI experiences include contextual advisors, offering expert users productivity-boosting automation while also helping new users to upskill faster and achieve good results with less supervision – a valuable tool as the industry faces a growing skills shortage in many essential roles.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 28, 2023 | Cloud, Edge, Operations Management, Software
Containers, specifically Kubernetes, constitute a powerful tool in the modern edge-to-cloud architecture, ZEDEDA has developed a service model for the technology.
In brief:
- ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service is a fully managed service including a Kubernetes runtime curated, managed and supported by ZEDEDA.
- Organizations can instantly deploy Kubernetes infrastructure at the distributed edge, securely and cost-efficiently.
- ZEDEDA’s partnerships and integrations with industry-leading orchestrators, such as Avassa, Rafay, Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher and VMware Tanzu, provide a robust solution for the modern edge landscape.
ZEDEDA has announced ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service, a fully managed Kubernetes service for the distributed edge. The new service includes a Kubernetes runtime that is curated, managed and supported by ZEDEDA, as well as integrations with industry-leading orchestrators.
Deploying Kubernetes at the edge is challenging because it was built for centralized data centers and scale-out clouds and, therefore, not for inherently constrained and distributed edge environments. ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service is a fully managed service that simplifies Kubernetes deployments at the edge, allowing customers to focus on their applications instead of managing and maintaining the underlying infrastructure. The new service eliminates the struggles typically associated with Kubernetes deployments at the edge, such as highly remote or distributed locations, constrained devices, unreliable security, lack of skilled IT personnel in the field and undependable network connectivity. ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service enables organizations to deploy and run Kubernetes infrastructure at the distributed edge remotely, securely and cost-efficiently.
“Our customers are industry leaders who are pushing the boundaries of innovation at the distributed edge, and working with them, we realized the need for an edge service that would remove the obstacles of deploying Kubernetes in these environments,” said Said Ouissal, ZEDEDA’s CEO and founder. “ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service is a first-of-its-kind fully managed edge solution that enables our customers to use any Kubernetes tools that fit their needs and provides a clear path to modernize edge infrastructure while leveraging existing IT investments.”
ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service Provides Full Lifecycle-Managed Kubernetes.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 28, 2023 | Automation, Cloud, Edge, Embedded Control
Edge compute continues to be the most talked about part of the network these days. This news concerns an application development platform for Edge and Cloud. I wish I could try out all this software like I used to many years ago. It’s all too complex and expensive today. Like everything, I don’t know if it works, but it sounds good.
Lightbend Inc., the company providing cloud native microservices frameworks for some of the world’s largest brands, has announced the release of its latest version of Akka, one of the industry’s most powerful platforms for distributed computing, which incorporates a new and unique programming model that enables developers to build an application once and have it work across both Cloud and Edge environments.
“Today, applications developed for cloud native environments are generally not well-suited to the Edge and vice versa,” said Jonas Bonér, Lightbend’s founder and CEO. “This has always struck me as counter-productive, as both architectures lean heavily on one another to be successful. As the line between Cloud and Edge environments continues to blur, Akka Edge brings industry-first capabilities to enable developers to build once for the Cloud and, when ready, deploy seamlessly to the Edge.”
“Akka has been a powerful enabling technology for us to build high-performance Cloud systems for our clients,” said Jean-Philippe Le Roux, CEO of Reflek.io, an innovative company delivering Digital Twin technologies to geo-distributed companies. “We have been able to dramatically speed our time-to-production by building a single solution for both Cloud and Edge with Akka.”
Akka provides a singular programming model that eliminates the high latency, large footprint, and complexity barriers the Edge has posed for development teams wanting to bridge the Edge and Cloud. Developers focus on business logic, not complicated, time-consuming tool integrations. As a result, businesses can harness, distribute, and fully utilize the vast amount of intelligent data to improve their operations, regardless of where that data is generated. Some specific capabilities of the latest version of Akka include:
- Adaptive Data Availability
- Projections over gRPC for the Edge – asynchronous, brokerless service-to-service communication
- Scalability and efficiency improvements to handle the large scale of many Edge services
- Programmatically defined low-footprint active entity migration
- Temporal, geographic, and use-based migration
- Run Efficiently In Resource Constrained Environments
- Support for more constrained environments such as running with GraalVM native image and lightweight Kubernetes distributions
- Support for multidimensional autoscaling and scale to near zero
- Lightweight storage, for running durable actors at the far edge
- A Single Programming Model for the Cloud-to-Edge Continuum
- Akka single programming model keeps the code, the tools, the patterns, and the communication the same, regardless if it is Cloud, Edge, or in between
- Seamless Integration – works at the Edge or in the Cluster automatically
- Empowering New Innovation
- Active/Active digital twins, and many other new use cases
- No dealing with complicated logic to handle network segregation
- Focus on business logic and flow (not on tool integrations)
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 15, 2023 | Cloud, Internet of Things, Operations Management
Some years ago Belden was searching for a greater IoT presence in a manner I felt was not strategically aligned. This acquisition makes sense even given the rather garbled marketing justifications in the news release. Although a few companies are investigating other means than Cloud, certainly having a presence in the Cloud is essential for many applications. Belden announces here the acquisition of German-based Industrial IoT (IIoT) specialist CloudRail.
With the acquisition of CloudRail, Belden continues its strategy to deliver the infrastructure that makes the digital journey simpler, more smart and secure. Belden is moving beyond connectivity – from what we make to what we make possible through a performance-driven portfolio, forward-thinking expertise and purpose-built solutions with a leadership position in the evolving IIoT sector.
I found that paragraph a little confusing. They really meant what they said here.
While Belden already had a strong portfolio of products in the areas of data acquisition, edge computing, and security, the industrial automation market also encounters a clear shift from on-premise systems to the cloud.
“CloudRail literally connects the factory to the Cloud. The founders of the company recognized this trend early and gained a unique leadership position. CloudRail complements our solution portfolio by adding sensor data ingestion capabilities to our Belden HORIZON DataOperations Platform and it fully supports the Belden Industrial EDGE strategy”, says Brian Lieser, Executive Vice President at Belden.
CloudRail offers solutions for industrial customers to connect assets to cloud platforms like AWS or Microsoft Azure.
