by Gary Mintchell | Mar 25, 2020 | Events, Internet of Things, News
With all this staying home protocol going on, are you missing the travel scene? Some pundits are doing a linear extrapolation from a limited data set and predicting a “new normal” where all conferences are virtual. Have you heard that before?
October might be a good time for IoT people to consider a trip to Barcelona. This announcement just arrived from The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) concerning a call for papers for IoT Solutions World Congress (IOTSWC), the global reference for industry IoT and the annual meeting for end users to discuss new IoT projects.
In its sixth year, IOTSWC runs from October 27-29, 2020, in Barcelona and is co-located with the AI & Cognitive Systems Forum, the Barcelona Cybersecurity Congress and the Wireless Global Congress.
“IOTSWC continues to be the place to go to hear from industry IoT users,” said Deloitte Global IoT Lead Helena Lisachuk. “Industry leaders can learn a lot from one another and this year we have shifted our track titles from industries to major solutions and use cases around IoT. This maintains our focus on end-user stories, but will enable IoT leaders across industries to more easily identify where they can best learn from their peers.”
Last year, a record-breaking 16,000 visitors from 120 countries attended the Congress. The three-day event featured 300 top-level speakers discussing digitalization for businesses across industries. This year, potential speakers are asked to share the essential ingredients necessary to harness the transformative potential of IoT, highlighting use cases or business cases that demonstrate how IoT is:
- Reshaping the way enterprises execute business processes
- Achieving tangible business outcome metrics such as improved efficiency, reliability, asset management, remote monitoring, increased productivity, decreased downtime, increased profits, etc.
- Creating new revenue streams
- Making new business models possible
- Enabling synergy with other advanced technologies like AI, blockchain, digital twin, robotics and more.
“IOTSWC is an industry-leading technology conference bringing together best-in-class solution providers with real-world users,” said Leila Dillon, VP Marketing & Communications at Ameresco. “This conference highlights the solutions that are in the global market today, showcases how they are making a measurable difference and gives end-users a blueprint for success in their own implementations. Driven by a relentless focus on customer use cases, IOTSWC is not to be missed.”
“IoTSWC gives me an opportunity to catch up on the global landscape of industry IoT every year. The speakers share their wealth of practical knowledge and are open to professional networking and open dialog about their challenges and successes,” said Shyam V. Nath, Oracle, Director IoT and Cloud. “It always surprises me to see how end-user companies work hand-in-hand with IoT solution providers to tweak solutions for industry-specific problems such as quality control of industrial manufacturing and ensuring adequate food production via smart farming.”
The Five IOT Solutions World Congress Tracks
- Security – Enterprises are in need of security solutions to prevent data breaches into their systems. As more information is available through IoT devices, enterprises need to protect their data network properly. Topics include use cases on solutions such as: Digital Trust through Blockchain, Cybersecurity, Digital Certification, Cloud Data Protection Gateways and Data Encryption.
- Connectivity – With the global roll-out of 5G, enterprises are in the need of finding connectivity so providers can offer flexible plans for implementing IoT devices. Topics include use cases on solutions such as: 5G, Edge Computing, Autonomous Vehicles, Traffic Management, LPWAN, eSIM vs uSIM and Vehicle Telematics.
- Business Optimization – IoT enables companies to identify gaps and potential risks thanks to available data in the value chain. Topics include use cases on solutions such as: Digital Twins, Virtual Reality, IoT Cloud Platform, Big Data Analytics, Augmented Reality, Additive Manufacturing – 3D, Remote Operating Center, Smart Metering, Workplace Management, Tracking Assets, Predictive Maintenance, Fleet Management, Inventory Management, Digital Thread and Fog Computing.
- Intelligence – The combination of IoT and technologies, such as machine learning, provide humans with the tools needed to interpret relevant, but sometimes non-structured data. Topics include use cases on solutions such as: Artificial Intelligence, Collaborative Robots and Deep Learning Platforms.
- Customer – IoT provides valuable customer data so companies can deliver quality improvement solutions to clients while improving the customer experience. Topic areas include use case presentations that focus on solutions such as: Remote Health Monitoring, MHealth, Tracked Ingestible Sensors and Smart Parking.
All submissions must be use-case/business-case-focused, with business outcome metrics clearly highlighted. Priority selection is given to use-case oriented submissions that include an end-user speaker. The deadline to submit to the IOTSWC 2020 CFP is April 30, 2020. Click hereto apply.
The conference sessions for IOTSWC are built by a program committee responsible for developing the strategy for the congress, the overall content and bringing together industry leaders. Sessions illustrate how companies are realizing positive business outcomes from implementing IoT and how they collaborated with their solutions teams to make it happen. The committee is comprised of a cross-section of industry and technology leaders who build the program covering multiple industries, technologies, standards and applications.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 17, 2020 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT
Suddenly the subject of “containers” has moved from the realm of IT into the realm of manufacturing IT (aka OT). One company held a press conference at the decidedly OT-oriented ARC Forum last February. If you are new to containers, check out Kubernetes.
Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.
The complex dance among several of the IT suppliers regarding manufacturing IoT has been fascinating. Dell jumped in, but following a less-than-stellar-result from its EMC acquisition has pretty much jettisoned anything to with IoT. HPE has shuffled things and people, but it remains a player bringing together its edge computing and wireless technologies showing signs of life. The third one I’ve worked with is Hitachi Vantara. This recently formed subsidiary of Hitachi has some solid technology and market awareness. It is another one to watch.Speaking of
Hitachi Vantara, the wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi that focuses on building hardware and software to help companies manage their data, it has announced acquiring the assets of Containership, one of the earlier players in the container ecosystem, which shut down its operations last October.
Containership, which launched as part of the TechCrunch 2015 Disrupt New York Startup Battlefield, started as a service that helped businesses move their containerized workloads between clouds. It then moved on to focus solely on Kubernetes.
“Containership enables customers to easily deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters and containerized applications in public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise environments,” writes Bobby Soni, the COO for digital infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara. “The software addresses critical cloud native application issues facing customers working with Kubernetes such as persistent storage support, centralized authentication, access control, audit logging, continuous deployment, workload portability, cost analysis, autoscaling, upgrades, and more.”
Hitachi Vantara says it will continue to work with the Kubernetes community. Containership was a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Hitachi never was, but after this acquisition, that may change.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 13, 2020 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or Manufacturing
Enterprise Solution (MES), that is the question. Actually, I didn’t know that
it was a question, or an either/or. I’m thinking false dichotomy.
As you might imagine, I receive a ton of emails from a
variety of marketing and PR people promoting one thing or another. Recently, a message arrived from Brock
Solutions highlighting just that question. Since I know several people at
Brock, including the man whose name is on the building, so to speak, and since
I respect the organization, I bit.
Here is the pitch: Many of our manufacturing customers
have multiple plants around the world. And it’s safe to say that each of
those plants are different. Some plants come from acquisitions. Some have been
around forever. And some plants are brand new.
Inevitably, this mix of sites also means a mix of
technology at the operational layer. As you may know, there is no easy answer
to manage this. Watch our video to see how
we help manufacturers evaluate MES vs. IoT using a
standard criteria.
They then sent me to a vlog (video blog). This is, of course, a little promotional at the end. But some good issues are raised about evaluating your business, your technical needs, your application needs and fitting a solution to the need. It’s worth a watch. Only 5 minutes.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 28, 2020 | Internet of Things, Leadership, Manufacturing IT
Gasp! Signs of common sense begin to pervade the discussion of digitalization and its cousins–connected (everything?), digital twin, cyber-physical, and so forth. Meaning that it’s all about leadership.
Suppliers constantly develop or enhance technologies within products. But I’m betting that just about all of you already have more digital data than you know what to do with. I’m betting most of you already have some products and connectivity–and have had for 15 years or longer.
What is always lacking is the will, the ingenuity, the, yes, leadership, to use all of this to its most beneficial effect.
Leadership doesn’t just appoint someone to head an exploratory team. It sets vision and expectations about how a new business model can send the company on a growth and success trajectory.
Leadership sees data as an asset and asks how it can be used to further goals of profitability, process uptime, improved quality, faster time to market, better/faster customer service, supply chain smoothing, and more.
Leadership organizes and motivates people to forge new paths into the economy.
Simply compiling digital data is a waste of time and resources. Leadership treats it as a foundation for success.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 27, 2020 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, Standards
I’ve received a couple of news items about something called the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP). I have searched in vain for a website–maybe a GitHub or Linux Foundation or something. This is sponsored by Microsoft, so no surprise that it is built on Microsoft Azure. I guess the open part is open connectivity to Azure.
I had a brief chat in Hannover a couple of weeks ago and picked up this press release. The companies putting this together have added members. Just a few right now. Like always, I adopt a “wait-and-see” attitude to see how this develops.
In brief:
- Anheuser-Busch InBev, BMW Group, Bosch Group, Microsoft, ZF Friedrichshafen AG named OMP steering committee members
- OMP was established in 2019 as an independent initiative under the umbrella of the Joint Development Foundation
- First working groups created: IoT Connectivity, Semantic Data Model, Industrial IoT Reference Architecture and Core Services for Autonomous Transport Systems
- The first appearance of the Open Manufacturing Platform
The Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) has expanded, with new steering committee members and new working groups established. OMP is an alliance founded in 2019 to help manufacturing companies accelerate innovation at scale through cross-industry collaboration, knowledge and data sharing as well as access to new technologies. The OMP was founded under the umbrella of the Joint Development Foundation, which is part of the Linux Foundation.
Original members The BMW Group and Microsoft welcome Anheuser-Busch InBev (AbInBev), Bosch Group and ZF Friedrichshafen AG as steering committee members. The OMP steering committee has approved a number of working groups to focus on core areas important to the industry, including IoT Connectivity, semantic data models, Industrial IoT reference architecture, and core services for ATS (autonomous transport systems).
Common approach to industry challenges
The expansion of intelligent manufacturing is driving new efficiencies and increased productivity, as well as revealing new challenges. Within the industry, legacy and proprietary systems have resulted in data silos, making operation-wide insight and transformation daunting. As common challenges across the industry, they often require a high degree of investment for modest returns within any one organization. The OMP has been developed to address this, where manufacturers and their value chains come together to identify and develop solutions that address these non-differentiating problems. It brings together experts across the manufacturing sector — including discrete and process manufacturing, transportation and consumer goods, industrial equipment, and more.
“Our goal is to drive manufacturing innovation at scale, accelerate time-to-value and drive production efficiencies by jointly solving mutual challenges, based on an open community approach. The OMP helps manufacturing companies unlock the potential of their data, implement industrial solutions faster and more securely, and benefit from industrial contributions while preserving their intellectual property (IP) and competitive advantages, mitigating operational risks and reducing financial investments,” said Jürgen Maidl, Senior Vice President Production Network and Supply Chain Management at the BMW Group.
Scale innovation through common data models and open technology standards
The OMP operates under the umbrella of the Joint Development Foundation (JDF). The JDF is part of the Linux Foundation and provides the OMP with infrastructure and an organizational framework to create technical specifications and support open industry standards. The OMP supports other alliances, including the OPC Foundation and Plattform Industrie 4.0, and leverages existing industry standards, open source reference architectures and common data models.
“Through the open collaboration approach that is the cornerstone of OMP, manufacturing companies will be able to bring offerings to market faster, with increased scale and greater efficiency,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President Cloud & AI at Microsoft. “Solutions will be published and shared across the community, regardless of technology, solution provider or cloud platform.”
The heart of OMP: working groups to address common manufacturing challenges
“Comprised of members from across the manufacturing industry, the collaboration framework and heart of the OMP are its working groups. We are very excited to join in a moment where our manufacturing facilities are becoming increasingly connected, and we are looking for innovative ways to make use of the treasure trove of data that is being generated,” said Tassilo Festetics, Global Vice President of Solutions at AB InBev. The OMP initial first working groups will focus on topics such as IoT Connectivity, Semantic Data Model, IIoT Reference Architecture and Core Services for ATS (autonomous transport systems). Initial focus areas include:
The OMP steering committee will support industry efforts to connect IoT devices and machines to the cloud. It is one of the first steps to digitize production lines and leverage cloud-connected Industrial IoT applications.
“Today, it is all about analytics and predictions but without data no analytics and without connectivity no data. Modern devices can easily be connected via the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA). Connecting machines and applications to the cloud that have been in production for decades comes with bigger interoperability challenges as various standards and interfaces must be addressed to interconnect these historically developed legacy systems (‘brownfield approach’). The working group IoT Connectivity will focus on providing industrial-grade edge and cloud functionalities for the integration and management of OPC UA devices in brownfield environments,” said Werner Balandat, Head of Production Management, ZF Friedrichshafen AG.
Another OMP working group focuses on semantic data modeling: Machine and manufacturing data are crucial for industrial companies to optimize production with artificial intelligence (AI). However, managing data in a common format across multiple sources with constantly evolving semantics is a real challenge.
“Data is the raw material for Industry 4.0 and a prerequisite for optimizing production with the help of artificial intelligence. At OMP, we are developing a semantic model that makes data understandable and illustrates its relations and dependencies. Users no longer receive cryptic, incomprehensible numbers and characters, but production-relevant information including their context. This semantic data structure ensures improvements along the entire value chain and makes AI-based business models possible on a large scale,” said Dr.-Ing. Michael Bolle, Member of the Board of Management, Robert Bosch GmbH.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 20, 2020 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT
The “Edge” is a hot space right now, although sometimes I’m not sure that everyone agrees what “Edge” is as they develop products and solutions. However, first thing this morning I saw this tweet from Tom Bradicich of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (@HPE) referring to an article that mentions him in CouputerWeekly.com. I’ve written about HPE at the edge and with IoT before. Looks like something’s up.
Tweet from @TomBradicichPhD Not only computing at the #edge, but also a new product category of “converging IT with #OT” systems (such as controls, DAQ, industrial protocols). Watch this space, my team’s next innovation is all this as-a-service. #aaS
Here is the rationale from the Computer Weekly article. “The benefits of edge computing have the potential to help businesses dramatically speed up their data analysis time while cutting down costs. @HPE’s Mark Potter and @TomBradicichPhD share how we can make this possible.”
In the past, all data processing was run locally on the industrial control system. But while there is industry consensus that real-time data processing for decision-making, such as the data processing needed in an industrial control system, should be run at the edge and not in the public cloud, there are many benefits in using the public cloud or an on-premise datacentre to assimilate data across installations of internet of things (IoT)-connected machines. Such data aggregation can be used to improve machine learning algorithms.
It is fascinating to see our environment described by an enterprise IT writer. The truth is that following the Purdue Model, suppliers tried to make PLCs and DCSs part of the information infrastructure in parallel to supervising or executing control functions. That proved too unwieldy for control engineers to manage within the programming tools used. It was also too slow and not really optimized for the task.
Along came IT companies. I have followed a few over the past five years. They have had trouble with figuring out how to make a business out of edge compute, gateways, networking, and the like.
In the past, data acquisition and control systems were considered operational technology, and so were outside the remit of enterprise IT. But, as Tom Bradicich, global head of the edge and IoT labs at HPE explains, IT has a role to play in edge computing.
Bradicich’s argument is that edge computing can provide a converged system, removing the need for standalone devices that were previously managed by those people in the organisation responsible for operational technology (OT). According to Bradicich, convergence is a good thing for the industry because it is convenient, makes it easy to buy devices, lowers cost, improves reliability, and offers better power consumption because all the disparate functions required by an industrial system are integrated in one device.
Bradicich believes convergence in IoT will be as big as the convergence of camera and music players into a device like the iPhone, which made Apple the biggest music and camera company in the world. For Bradicich, convergence at the edge will lead to industry disruption, similar to what happened when smartphones integrated several bits of functionality that were previously only available as separate devices. “The reason Uber exists is because there is a convergence of GPS, the phone and the maps,” he says. “This disrupts the whole industry.”
I get this analogy to converging technologies into a device such as the iPhone. I don’t know if we want to cede control over to an HPE compute platform (although it has plenty of horsepower), but the idea is tempting. And it would be thoroughly disruptive.
Forrester has forecast that the edge cloud service market will grow by at least 50%. Its Predictions 2020 report notes that public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft; telecommunication companies such as AT&T, Telstra and Vodafone Group; platform software providers such as Red Hat and VMware; content delivery networks including Akamai Technologies; and datacentre colocation providers such as Digital Realty are all developing basic infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and advanced cloud-native programming services on distributed edge computing infrastructure.
HPE’s investment in a new company called Pensando, which recently emerged from stealth mode and is founded and staffed by former Cisco technologists with former Cisco CEO John Chambers installed as Chairman, Sunil believes new categories of device will come to market, aimed at edge computing, could lead to a plethora of new devices perhaps to perform data acquisition and real-time data processing.
Mark Potter recently wrote in a blog post, By becoming the first solutions providers to deliver software-defined compute, networking, storage and security services to where data is generated, HPE and Pensando will enable our customers to dramatically accelerate the analysis and time-to-insight of their data in in a way that is completely air-gapped from the core system.
These are critically-important requirements in our hyper-connected, edge-centric, cloud-enabled and data-driven world – where billions of people and trillions of things interact.
This convergence is generating unimaginable amounts of data from which enterprises seek to unearth industry-shaping insights. And as emerging technologies like edge computing, AI and 5G become even more mainstream, enterprises have an ever-growing need to harness the power of that data. But moving data from its point of generation to a central data center for processing presents major challenges — from substantial delays in analysis to security, governance and compliance risks.
That’s where Pensando and HPE are making an industry-defining difference. By moving the traditionally data center-bound network, storage and security services to the server processing the data, we will eliminate the need for round-trip data transfer to centralized network and security appliances – and at a lower cost, with more efficiency and higher performance.
Here are benefits that Potter listed:
- Lower latency to competitive solutions, as operations will be carried at a 100Gbps network line rate speed;
- Controller management framework to scale across thousands of nodes with a federation of controllers allowing scale to 1M+ endpoints; and
- Security, governance and compliance policies that are consistently applied at the edge.
