by Gary Mintchell | Sep 8, 2022 | Cloud, Data Management, Enterprise IT, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
Steve Leeper, VP Systems Engineering and Marketing, and Carl D’Halluin, Chief Technology Officer of Datadobi, met with me recently to discuss data, unstructured data management, data migration, the company, and those poor little orphaned files and data left in storage long after they had useful life.
I’ve been writing about the company’s products for about two years. Datadobi is about to celebrate its 13th birthday. Organically funded, management expects it to be around for some time to come.
The occasion of this conversation was release 6.2 and an upgrade to the recently announced StorageMAP product—a multi-vendor, multi-cloud data management platform with the introduction of capabilities to discover and remediate orphaned data.
Orphaned data is owned by employees of a company that are inactive but still enabled on an organization’s network or systems. These datasets, which can amount to a significant part of a company’s total data stored, represent risk and cost to every organization. Any enterprise with a large employee base, normal to high attrition rates, or undertaking merger and acquisition (M&A) activities will be vulnerable to orphaned data. Orphaned data is mostly not of value to the organization and creates liability due to its unknown content. Eliminating orphaned data enables IT leaders to reduce cost, lower carbon footprint, and lower risk while maximizing value out of relevant unstructured data used by active users.
With the new capabilities, StorageMAP can identify data sets with high amounts of orphaned data, allowing IT leaders to group and organize the data independent of the business organization. The orphaned datasets can then be migrated, archived to a lower-cost platform, or deleted by StorageMAP. The platform provides an easy-to-read, granular report on the top users with orphaned data and for additional detail, a search function allows targeted searches to be executed across part of or the entire data estate.
The 6.2 release comes after Datadobi launched its StorageMAP platform earlier this year. StorageMAP provides a single pane of glass for organizations to manage unstructured data across their complete data storage estate on-premises and in the cloud. This latest update enables IT leaders to fully take control of orphaned data on their networks.
“Due to the scale and complexity of unstructured data in today’s heterogeneous storage environments, enterprises can easily lose track of orphaned data within networks and open themselves up to excess storage costs and risk,” said Carl D’Halluin, CTO, Datadobi. “StorageMAP’s new capabilities allow for a seamless experience identifying and taking the appropriate action on orphaned data to give IT leaders peace of mind.”
“As data proliferation continues, IT leaders are going to see more orphaned data on their networks. This is why it is so important that organizations turn to unstructured data management solutions like StorageMAP to find datasets associated with inactive users and take the appropriate action,” said Craig Ledo, IT Validation Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “Combined with a high level of cross-vendor knowledge, years of real-life experience, and great customer support, enterprises can let StorageMAP do the heavy lifting when it comes to orphaned data.”
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 29, 2022 | Cloud, Operations Management, Operator Interface, Software
Mainstream tech media drools all over augmented reality and virtual reality. Which big tech company will introduce what? We’ve written about the benefits of AR in manufacturing for years. It’s still getting here, but closing in. This news comes from a company called RealWear with a new cloud SaaS offering—RealWear Cloud, marking the company’s shift from a hardware-centric company to a fully platform-centric business. The company calls this “assisted intelligence.”
RealWear Cloud is a multi-purpose software offering for IT and business operations. Through the new dashboard, IT and business operations can remotely and securely streamline control of their RealWear device fleet. As companies grow their fleet of RealWear devices, RealWear Cloud allows for convenient low-touch, over-the-air firmware updates, keeping the devices secure and company data protected. Working alongside organizations’ existing EMM or MDM software such as Microsoft Endpoint Manager (InTune), the offering further provides teams more real-time data and metrics to optimize operational efficiency. RealWear Cloud complements existing EMM/MDM solutions and enables device-specific control and configuration capabilities. Also, it is the only way to gain trusted and secure access to certified third-party apps designed for our product portfolio.
In addition, RealWear is introducing RealWear Cloud Assistance as part of the offering. RealWear Cloud Assistance provides real-time remote technical support and troubleshooting to frontline workers to quickly identify, diagnose and fix device issues. Reducing device downtime through remote troubleshooting will have a growing impact on company bottom lines. According to VDC research, individual incidences of device failure result in 72 minutes of lost or disrupted productivity for frontline workers. Remote support, firmware updates, and data analytics will not only increase productivity but will be necessary as businesses face ongoing talent shortages, the scarcity of which Gartner notes was exacerbated in 2021.
RealWear Cloud will provide a two-tier offering: Basic and Pro. Foresight, RealWear’s previous lightweight device management tool, will transition to RealWear Cloud. Current Foresight customers will automatically be enrolled in the Basic plan.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 18, 2022 | Cloud, Edge, Enterprise IT, Manufacturing IT, Open Source, Operations Management, Software
Much as some of its large industrial competitors, ABB is quickly building out industrial software solutions. A friend who is a financial analyst told me that Wall Street and other investors prize software right now. A company focused on instrumentation and automation platforms doesn’t evoke the same eyes full of longing and desire as when they add software.
In this announcement, ABB and Red Hat, the open source enterprise software company, are partnering to deliver ABB automation and industrial software solutions at the intersection of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT), equipping the industrial ecosystem with extended deployment capabilities and greater agility. This is consistent with ABB’s vision of the evolution of process automation.
- ABB will deliver digital solutions to customers on-demand and at scale using Red HatOpenShift
- Customers will be better able to harness the potential of data-based decisions by using applications that can be deployed flexibly from the edge to the cloud
The partnership enables virtualization and containerization of automation software with Red Hat OpenShift to provide advanced flexibility in hardware deployment, optimized according to application needs. It also provides efficient system orchestration, enabling real-time, data-based decision making at the edge and further processing in the cloud.
Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its foundation, provides ABB with a single consistent application platform, from small single node systems to scaled-out hyperconverged clusters at the industrial edge, which simplifies development and management efforts for ABB’s customers.
“This exciting partnership with Red Hat demonstrates ABB’s commitment to meet customer needs by seeking alliances with other innovative market leaders,” said Bernhard Eschermann, Chief Technology Officer, ABB Process Automation. “The alliance with Red Hat will see ABB continue helping our customers improve their operations as they navigate a rapidly evolving digital landscape. It will give them access to the tools they need to integrate plantwide IT and OT, while reducing risks and optimizing performance.”
Red Hat OpenShift increases the deployment flexibility and scalability of ABB Ability Edgenius, a comprehensive edge platform for industrial software applications, together with ABB Ability Genix Industrial Analytics and AI Suite, an enterprise-grade platform and applications suite that leverages industrial AI to drive Industry 4.0 digital business outcomes for customers. ABB’s Edgenius and Genix can both be scaled seamlessly and securely across multiple deployments. With this partnership, ABB will have access to capabilities like zero-touch provisioning (remote configuration of networks) which can increase manageability and consistency across plant environments.
“Red Hat is excited to work with ABB to bring operational and information technology closer together to form the industrial edge. Together, we intend to streamline the transition from automated to autonomous operations and address current and future manufacturing needs using open-source technologies,” said Matt Hicks, executive vice president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat. “As we work to break down barriers between IT and the plant level, we look to drive limitless innovation and mark a paradigm shift in operational technology based on open source.”
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 8, 2022 | Cloud, Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
ThinkIQ developed a manufacturing software platform focused on the flow of materials through the manufacturing process rather than the health of specific machines. I’ve had several interviews over the past couple of years with executives I’ve known for years from previous gigs. You can check them out here, here, and here.
I recently conducted an interview with Doug Lawson, CEO, Brian Anderson, CMO, and Rob Schoenthalar, CRO to discuss an added feature to their offering. They have added vision as a sensor attempting to solve a sticky problem for manufacturing management.
The problem? ThinkIQ’s customers are still effectively blind to up to 70% of events on the Factory Floor. Current safety practices are primarily reactive and rather than averting any unfortunate incident in the first place, these procedures only provide solutions to salvage a regrettable situation.
The solution? Enhancements to its Vision Platform.
Locating cameras in strategic locations around the plant facility, Think IQ can look at safety and correlations among activities. Maybe checking events of ship, store, manufacturing, looking for root causes. They offered an example General Mills has publicized where they recorded savings of $40 million out of oats for making Cheerios. They also avoided multiple recalls by detecting gluten entering the process before manufacturing.
An MES or other software may not always record every aspect of a process. Merging cameras with their MES, ThinkIQ can add much more data plus analysis to discover more problems. Their cameras do not do parts inspection. They observe movement and behavior generating what they call “Operational Data Streams.” Now ThinkIQ can combine data about material flow plus what machines are doing plus what people are doing. Operations does not need to ask operators to fill out HMI screen forms about what happened. ThinkIQ’s value add is intellectual property around AI/ML looking for patterns in the data.
From the press release:
The latest version of ThinkIQ Vision now has out-of-the-box abilities to detect and digitize dozens of common manufacturing events including:
- Vehicle activities in receiving and shipping
- Material movements and presence
- Anonymous People presence and activity
- Machine state and physical events
- Andon light status
- Safety violations
- Values from legacy analog and disconnected digital displays
- Values from stand-alone displays
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 27, 2022 | Cloud, Enterprise IT, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced advances to its GreenLake flagship Software-as-a-Service platform at its Discover 2022 user conference. Below are the update summaries:
- Unified experience across edge to cloud
- Deepens security
- Extends developer tools
- Strengthens capabilities to run workloads at scale
- Transformed and modern private cloud experience with automated, flexible, scalable pay-as-you-go private cloud for traditional and cloud-native workloads
- Eight new cloud services including backup and recovery, block storage, compute operations management, data fabric, disaster recovery, hyperconverged infrastructure, as well as industry-vertical cloud services for customer engagement and payments
“Three years ago, at HPE Discover, HPE committed to delivering our entire portfolio as a service by 2022,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO, HPE. “Today, I am proud to say that not only have we delivered on that commitment, we have become a new company. HPE GreenLake has emerged as the go-to destination for hybrid cloud, and our industry-leading catalog of cloud services enables organizations to drive data-first modernization for all their workloads, across edge to cloud. The innovations unveiled today further build on our vision to provide the market with an unmatched platform to spur innovation and drive transformation.”
You have to give Neri credit. I was in the crowd three years ago when he made this audacious commitment to turn the entire company in a new direction. Not only has that goal been accomplished, but also customers have accepted it. The results reported have been outstanding.
In Q2 2022, HPE reported Annualized Revenue Run-Rate (ARR) of $829 million and triple digit as-a-service orders growth for the third consecutive quarter.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 19, 2022 | Cloud, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software
Current trends in software product management mandate new platforms to bring disparate applications together into some semblance of coherence. A few years back the term was “breaking down silos.” That term continues to pop up at times. As well as collaboration and cross-functional.
If any readers of this blog including the tens of thousands in Europe and Asia are still struggling with silos or figuring out how to get people to work together, you’re behind. Get with it. Astute managers have figured out how to get IT and OT to work together for several years.
I say this as context for another reason companies construct these platforms—acquisitions. Hexagon has filled its shopping cart recently with many companies. It is now up to management to find a way to bring coherence to the portfolio. Hexagon’s solution introduced at it’s user conference in Las Vegas in June is dubbed Nexus.
• The platform will connect people, technology, and data across the design, production and manufacturing workflow
• It will empower cross-functional teams with the insights to collaborate instinctively in real time
• Cloud-based technologies, applications, and solutions accelerate new product development
I think cloud-based is the key. Open APIs and cloud technologies such as modern databases enable a new generation of software solutions for customers.
Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division has announced an open platform for smart manufacturing, Nexus, which will revolutionise how technology professionals collaborate and innovate.
Nexus is the foundation for Hexagon’s new solution offerings in the smart manufacturing space going forward. Today, it is capable of leveraging Hexagon data sources from across the portfolio. Visualisations and data management solutions such as HxGN Metrology Reporting and MaterialCenter have been built as cloud-native connected applications, and will be connected through Nexus.
