This announcement relates more to IT than operations. ZEDEDA has established a spot in a technology called edge orchestration. As edge compute has become a hot thing finding ways to manage and orchestrate edge devices assumes importance.
This release concerns building automation, but the technology is more broadly applicable. ZEDEDA has delivered a scalable edge solution for Switch Automation, a global technology company for digitizing and decarbonizing buildings, enabling the company to provide innovative edge solutions for digital buildings.
Switch’s comprehensive smart building platform integrates with traditional building systems and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to analyze, automate and control assets in real time. During early deployments and without a fully formed management tool, Switch ran into scalability issues for hundreds of appliances.
ZEDEDA provided solutions and technical expertise for managing Switch’s edge devices – including the OS, the edge apps, and the network — and delivered a completely stable network device to allow Switch to achieve best-in-class uptime and a more robust support infrastructure.
Since leveraging ZEDEDA, Switch has reduced its overall maintenance hours typically consumed by OS and general software upgrades. That reduced downtime has translated into a more cost-effective operational management across all of its appliances.
The Industry IoT Consortium (IIC) announced it had updated its Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA). The IIRA Version 1.10 addresses the challenges of current industrial IoT systems and industry trends, such as the convergence of IT and OT, digital twins, systems comprised of independent systems, and the inclusion of “non-human” digital users.
The foundational views of the IIRA (Business, Usage, Functional, and Implementation) have not changed. Still, the IIC revised and extended the sections to address how organizations use the views. For example, the new IIRA includes mapping essential industrial IoT functions to system requirement categories. This helps organizations understand which functions will best meet their needs.
Another addition to the IIRA V1.10 is a new set of Architecture Patterns that system designers can use to tailor standard system features and implementations. The IIRA V1.10 also illustrates how system designers can overlay patterns with each other (or with different architecture patterns) to help them build new system implementations from a collection of well-understood models.
The Industry IoT Consortium delivers transformative business value to industry, organizations, and society by accelerating the adoption of a trustworthy internet of things. The Industry IoT Consortium is a program of the Object Management Group (OMG).
A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a panel discussion on the Web regarding the Industrial Metaverse. This is an interesting topic for discussion. Questions remain:
How much of the term metaverse is simply marketing covering a vacuum?
What are the real use cases (something we care about in industrial applications)?
What are the components of a metaverse?
Or, perhaps as a recent Dilbert cartoon had it when Dilbert asked the pointy-haired boss what color he wanted his metaverse to be?
Wo this press release was interesting. Molex explores the metaverse. What would this company specializing in connectivity see here?
From the release:
Manufacturers among first to benefit from convergence of physical and virtual processes to improve product-design cycles and factory of the future initiatives
AR/VR, digital twins, robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics poised to fuel adoption of industrial metaverse applications
Immediate and long-lasting impact on next-gen IoT creates new engineering opportunities and challenges
Molex and Arrow commissioned the development of this report to offer perspective on how the industrial metaverse will transform manufacturing through increased adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), digital twins, Machine Learning (ML) and predictive analytics. These early enablers already are gaining traction in industrial settings to support manufacturing automation, process optimization, remote assistance, and training, as well as predictive maintenance.
According to the report, a robust industrial metaverse will deliver unprecedented value, starting with the design and ideation phase of product development all the way through manufacturing, sales, service and maintenance.
The report addresses five functional pillars, including speed and bandwidth, signal integrity, form factor, power consumption and electromagnetic interference (EMI). In addition, the report offers guidelines for how companies can get started, as well as advice on integrating core capabilities throughout their internal and external business processes while ensuring secure connectivity and seamless data analysis.
HiveMQ Accelerates IoT Data Ingestion into Google Cloud
Aligning your IT infrastructure with a major supplier can be not only expensive, but also it can leave you vulnerable to corporate decisions made far away. For example, Google recently announced plans to retire Google IoT Core, leaving customers with less than a year to migrate their IoT applications to a new service.
The latest Rework podcast from 37 Signals features co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson (@DHH) and Operations Director Eron Nicholson discussing leaving the cloud. They address this issue and others.
If you are caught by this shift in Google strategy, there is one possible solution just announced. HiveMQ has developed an MQTT broker that bypasses Google IoT Core to send up to billions of messages per day directly to Google Cloud for advanced analytics.
HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Google Cloud Pub/Sub, is a new feature that seamlessly integrates MQTT data into Google Cloud. Organizations can now benefit from HiveMQ’s flexible, standards-based platform to send IoT data reliably and securely to Google Cloud enterprise services such as monitoring, advanced analytics and machine learning.
HiveMQ can replace IoT Core’s MQTT data ingestion service to connect MQTT clients using HiveMQ’s MQTT broker and then map the MQTT message into Google Pub/Sub.
HiveMQ Enables Real-Time IoT Observability from Device to Cloud
New feature traces MQTT data in real-time to give users better visibility into their IoT applications.
HiveMQ, a global leader in enterprise MQTT solutions, announced the availability of the HiveMQ Distributed Tracing Extension, a new feature that makes it possible to trace and debug MQTT data streams from device to cloud and back. Complete IoT observability requires insight into three pillars: metrics, traces and logs. HiveMQ has added distributed tracing to help organizations achieve end-to-end observability and make their IoT applications more performant and resilient.
Distributed Tracing is a way to trace events and achieve a high-level overview of a message’s journey through multiple, complex systems. With the Distributed Tracing Extension, HiveMQ is the first MQTT broker to add OpenTelemetry support to provide complete transparency for every publish message that uses the HiveMQ MQTT broker. OpenTelemetry is an open standard for instrumentation that allows for interoperability across all services so organizations can achieve visibility over their entire system.
MQTT is a de facto standard transport protocol in the IT world for communications. Cirrus Link and partners have been expanding the use for IoT in industrial applications. Along the way the Sparkplug information model was developed to assist the communication. This announcement adds Microsoft Azure to the portfolio.
Automatically connect MQTT Sparkplug models to Azure to accelerate industrial IoT time-to-value
Cirrus Link announced availability of the IoT Bridge for Microsoft Azure available on the Azure Marketplace, which connects standard MQTT Sparkplug data models to Azure Digital Twin and updates data changes to Azure Data Explorer for time series data.
Cirrus Link developed the IoT Bridge, a software widget based on Sparkplug that converts OT data to IT data automatically with zero coding required.
Without the IoT Bridge, companies have typically spent thousands of consulting dollars building customized coded solutions that are not scalable and end in catastrophe as a lost cause.
Consumes MQTT Sparkplug data (data model and tags)
Auto-creates data models to Azure Digital Twin
Auto-discovers data assets
Pushes tag data to Azure Digital Twin and Azure Data Explorer
Requires no programming or code
Customers can download and install the IoT Bridge software and within 30 minutes they can automatically have data in Microsoft Azure. The IoT Bridge takes OT data and points it to IT quickly and easily with an open standard approach.
With the pandemic mostly in the rearview mirror, Inductive Automation held its Ignition Community Conference 2022 in Folsom, CA Sept. 20-21.
ICC 2022
The event was sold out, as usual. Sessions were packed and lively with questions. I didn’t pick up much news from the event. It was good to catch up with people I’ve known for years but haven’t seen since 2019. The new Inductive leadership team mingled with customers and took a little time to chat with me.
Two things:
An acquaintance from another and non-competitive software company I talked with at the Hannover Messe Chicago the week before told me that his sales people saw Inductive everywhere. “They are crushing it,” he said. Indeed, it is the one company in its software market that has momentum and constant innovation.
I met owner/founder Steve Hechtman in 2006 at an ISA event. Everything he told me back then seemed far out—and everything they talked about at this conference confirmed his initial vision. Mostly that was doing SCADA in an IT-friendly way.
A bonus:
Here is a link to my March 15, 2011 podcast recorded in the conference room at the company’s original headquarters in Sacramento. This was the 112th episode of my podcast, which back then was Automation Minutes done for Automation World magazine. I expected Steve Hechtman to do all the talking, but he turned it over to the software developers of what is now Ignition—Colby Clegg (now CEO) and Carl Gould (now CTO).
