by Gary Mintchell | Apr 19, 2016 | Internet of Things
Dell, Fog IoT Alliance
I’ve been writing about Dell’s entrance into the manufacturing/industrial space since last October. It introduced its Internet of Things products, Edge Gateway, at Dell World. Recently its embedded computing line was announced. (Disclaimer: Dell is a client.) Several people wrote to me after that last announcement to say something like, “About time.”
Internet of Things Partners
Further expanding its efforts, Dell is launching the Dell IoT Solutions Partner Program for the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and solutions. The program builds an ecosystem of partners to help customers navigate the fragmented IoT landscape and identify the right technologies to develop their IoT solutions. Dell will offer participating partners access to its robust and reliable product portfolio, world-class support and increased opportunities for incremental business growth.
The program will combine a global, multi-tiered (Executive, Associate, Registered) network of experienced Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with Dell’s broad portfolio of IoT assets, including purpose-built intelligent gateways, embedded PCs, security and manageability tools, data center and cloud infrastructure, and data integration and analytics software like Boomi and Statistica. These assets will help organizations develop, deploy and maintain leading-edge IoT solutions.
“Dell believes that opportunities increase when you help others win,” said Andy Rhodes, executive director, Commercial IoT Solutions, Dell. “We are passionate about collaborating with this strong group of companies and believe ISVs are critical in building the bridge between the exciting industry potential of IoT and profitable market reality.”
Dell works with Information Technology (IT) and Operations Technology (OT) organizations to create a unifying IoT strategy for bridging their differing business approaches. The IoT Partner Program will include companies across a wide range of industries that further strengthen Dell’s expertise in areas such as industrial and building automation and transportation. It launches with more than 25 partners including GE, SAP, Software AG, Microsoft, OSIsoft and others, many of which are utilizing the Dell Edge Gateway 5000 Series to power their own IoT solutions. Dell also continues to build relationships with systems integrators (SIs) with vertical expertise and deployment scale.
Additional partners include Azeti, Blue Pillar, Datawatch, Eigen Innovations, Flowthings, Flutura, GE, Kepware, Lynx Software, Microsoft Azure, OSIsoft, Relayr, SAP, Software AG, and Thingworx.
Kepware’s Role
Creating use case blueprints is one of the many ways Dell is working with partners to help customers speed up their Internet of Things projects and make sense of the vast ISV landscape. Dell, Kepware, and Software AG are collaborating to develop IoT enabled predictive maintenance models utilizing distributed analytics to address the industry’s biggest operational challenges, such as unplanned downtime, overall equipment effectiveness, maintenance cost and return on assets.
Specifically looking at Kepware’s role with the Partner Program and the Predictive Maintenance model, I had the opportunity to interview Eric Dellinger, Kepware’s IoT manager. We’ve met several times, most recently at the Industry of Things conference in San Diego last February. We caught up by phone this time.
Dellinger told me he had been talking with Dell for six or seven months about various partnership and collaboration opportunities. “One great benefit,” he said, “is getting access to hardware and being part of marketing initiatives. Another great thing with program has been ease of working with them. Sometimes companies hold you at more of an arm’s length. Dell is dealing in a more strategic manner. For example, our work with Dell on the predictive maintenance model where it outlines how to go to market. And it shows how various vendors can go together to create a solution. This is a really nice approach to collaborate on an initiative.”
There are other benefits to Dell’s approach such as sharing go-to-market strategies, leveraging training, and leveraging each other’s channel, continued Dellinger. “Then there is what it looks like to embed a solution in the IoT box. Maybe we can include ThingWorx (another PTC company) app development platform. Or we can go off-the-shelf with Software AG and SAP on a solution. This open program offers a way of thinking from customer’s perspective, bringing innovative solutions. There is less pushing products specifically and more on finding solutions.”
Part of joining the partner program is certifying products run on the platform. Dellinger said, “So on the certification process, we installed our product on the Dell IoT Gateway connecting to a Rockwell Automation PLC using the MQTT protocol to send data to the cloud and had it up and running in 10 minutes.
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 12, 2016 | Automation, News, Organizations, Technology
Quite a deluge of press releases coming
from the OPC Foundation preparing for the upcoming Hannover Messe. Microsoft was an original OPC supporter, and here a new representative from the company has joined the Board. Key to the announcement is OPC UA communication into the Microsoft Azure cloud.
The OPC Foundation has elected Microsoft to the Board of Directors of the OPC Foundation, which represents many of the world’s most prominent global suppliers. The new board seat, which will be held by Microsoft Director of IoT Business Development Matt Vasey, is an extension of Microsoft’s support for OPC Foundation since the company first became a member in 1995.
Microsoft’s longstanding commitment to interoperability and the OPC Foundation includes the OPC technology portfolio and OPC-UA, active participation in the OPC Foundation technology working groups, and ongoing representation on the OPC Foundation Technical Advisory Council.
“OPC-UA is an essential component of the connected products that manufacturing customers need today, and it is increasingly seen as an important part of enterprise IoT scenarios and business models,” said Matt Vasey, Microsoft Director of IoT Business Development. “I am personally excited to be working with the OPC team to help our customers unlock the value of these high-value IoT scenarios that span from the edge to the cloud. Microsoft is committed to openness and collaboration and fully supports OPC-UA and its evolution.”
“OPC-UA is widely recognized as a key communication technology for the Industry 4.0 initiative,” says Thomas J. Burke, OPC Foundation President & Executive Director. “Microsoft’s support for standards that foster IoT innovation, and specifically for OPC and OPC-UA, result in easy, direct and secure communications from PLC controllers on the shop floor to the top floor world of IT.”
“It’s a great honor to have Microsoft join the OPC Foundation Board of Directors, and we welcome Matt Vasey’s outstanding efforts to facilitate the acceleration of OPC UA as the solution for the Internet of Things,” added Burke.
“As one of the largest IT/Cloud companies, Microsoft joining the OPC Foundation board demonstrates its recognition of the role that OPC UA plays from plant floor to enterprise connectivity and IIoT for industrial automation and beyond”, according to Craig Resnick, Vice President, ARC Advisory Group. “From OPC’s perspective, having Microsoft as part of its board makes sense based on its long history of working with the OPC Foundation as well as its deploying scalable OPC UA connectivity solutions ranging from the sensor to the IT/enterprise and cloud. From Microsoft’s perspective, being part of OPC’s Board shows its commitment to openness for connecting platform independent architectures to its cloud systems, collecting data and providing its Azure cloud services for multiple operating systems beyond just Windows.”
Matt Vasey is currently responsible for IoT business development at Microsoft, working with a cross-functional team to continue to build out the ecosystem of technology partners, standards bodies, and other innovation catalysts that are required for the new generation of IoT applications, services, and systems that serve both individuals and businesses. He also serves as an officer and board member on the OpenFog Consortium, and was instrumental in the formation of this organization working closely with other founders from Intel, ARM, Cisco, Dell and Princeton University.
In addition to Mr. Vasey and Mr. Burke, the OPC Foundation Board includes Russ Agrusa, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ICONICS; Matthias Damm, President of Ascolab; Stefan Hoppe Senior Engineer of Beckhoff Automation and OPC Vice President, Thomas Hahn, Chief Software Expert at Siemens AG and OPC Vice President, Shinji Oda is General manager, Technology Marketing of Yokogawa Electric Corporation; Veronika Schmid-Lutz, Chief Product Owner for manufacturing products at SAP SE and Ziad Kaakani, Global System Engineering and Architecture, Honeywell Process Solutions.
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 11, 2016 | Automation, Workforce
Do you ever need a temporary automation expert to get you over a project hump? Ever wish there was something akin to Angie’s List for PLC programmers and other skilled industrial technical people?
Andy Urda called the other day to introduce me to a new company and concept in the workforce staffing industry—FactoryFix. Andy’s been in the industrial market for a long time with a few motion control suppliers. He’s trying some new things and ran into the founders of this company.
The idea is to match companies with needs for project help with local experts who specialize in the skills they need. FactoryFix has a platform that allows customers to post details about their project then wait as vetted service providers are brought to them.
According to the Web site, “We help industrial companies become more productive by providing an online marketplace of factory-wide solution providers. From basic machinery maintenance to custom assembly machines, our platform matches the customer with local companies whose expertise is perfect for their request. We also help entrepreneurs grow their businesses by solidifying their online presence and introducing to them local customers with immediate projects to bid on.”
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Read testimonials, ask questions and hire the best Expert for your project.
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Review their profiles, read reviews, and ask them questions. When you’re ready, decide which Expert is the right fit for your project and hire them.
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Interesting idea. Is this something you’d like? Do you do something similar now?
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 8, 2016 | Automation, Internet of Things, Interoperability, Networking, Operations Management
I have been discussing the importance of industrial protocols to successful use of the Industrial Internet of Things. Among three news releases from the OPC Foundation is news about collaborative work between the Object Management Group (OMG) and OPC Foundation to let DDS and OPC UA play nicely in the same sandbox. This is key because the Industrial Internet Consortium has adopted DDS as a standard, while much of the industrial automation community uses OPC.
Other news includes the announcement of support for publish/subscribe for OPC UA and an OPC UA open source initiative.
Industrial Protocol Collaboration
Specifically, the OPC Foundation and OMG have developed a technical positioning and FAQ document for usage of both the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and the OMG Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard. The positioning document explains that the OPC UA and DDS standards are largely complementary and compatible. Both are important to the future of the IIoT. The document is a joint recommendation; it helps companies quickly implement an IIoT strategy.
OPC UA and DDS Explained
OPC UA is an industrial communication architecture for platform independent, high performance, secure, reliable, and semantic interoperability between sensors, field devices, controllers, and applications at the shop-floor level in real-time as well as between the shop floor and the enterprise IT cloud. OPC UA allows SoA based easy “plug and produce” scenarios. The information about the system, its configuration, topology, and data context (the meta data) are exposed in the collective “address space” of the individual OPC UA servers.
This data can be accessed by authorized OPC UA clients that can see what is available, and choose what to access. OPC UA truly supports timeless durability as new networking technology is developed it can be plugged into OPC UA seamlessly. Client/Server, Pub/Sub and cloud protocols are integrated into OPC UA.
DDS provides location transparent, interoperable, secure, platform independent, real-time data sharing across any kind of network. DDS lets applications define and share user data with controlled “Quality of Service” (QoS) such as performance, scalability, reliability, durability and security. DDS hides network topology and connectivity details from the application, providing a simple yet powerful data-sharing abstraction that scales from local area networks to fog and cloud computing. It can support even large fan out and sub-millisecond latency. DDS defines a “common data-centric information model” so that applications can run “plug & play” with very little or no deployment configuration. System configuration details are deemphasized to ease redundancy and interoperability.
Today, there is little overlap between OPC UA and DDS in applications. Even when used in the same market (e.g. energy) the use cases are quite different. Today OPC UA provides client-server interaction between components such as devices or applications. DDS is a data-centric “bus” for integration and peer-to-peer data distribution. Because the focal applications and approaches for DDS and OPC UA are different, most applications clearly fit better with one or the other.
The OPC Foundation and OMG are working together on integration and have developed two ways for the technologies to work together. First, an “OPC UA/DDS gateway” will permit independent implementations to work together. Second, “OPC UA DDS Profile” will enable integrated use cases. Initial work to define both approaches is underway at the two standards organizations.
Customers must choose a standard path now to implement a successful IIoT strategy. By working together, the OPC UA and DDS communities will provide a non-proprietary path to interoperability, regardless of the customer’s choice of starting technology.
Open Source OPC UA
The open source repository of OPC UA is now available on the open source GitHub web site. Open source is a very important strategy to eliminate roadblocks to adoption of the technology. By open sourcing the OPC UA technology the OPC Foundation is now enabling easy access to the technology by academia and research organizations, as well as many suppliers and end-users that would like to assess the OPC UA technology as part of early adopter and feasibility analysis.
Open sourcing isn’t just the wave of the future. Open source strategy is now. The OPC Foundation is proud to make the OPC technology available to everyone via the open source repositories.
There are a number of OPC open-source initiatives already available from suppliers, research institutes and academia for OPC UA. The open source repository from the OPC Foundation is intended to supplement these other open-source initiatives, providing additional value. The OPC Foundation has committed resources to moderate/maintain and extend the technology to keep pace with technology changes in the industry as well as the extensions to the OPC UA architecture and corresponding companion specification.
Publish Subscribe
The OPC Foundation addition of publish/subscribe communication functionality to OPC UA provides the necessary infrastructure to achieve seamless interoperability for IIoT, IoT, and industrie 4.0 applications and devices. OPC has been based on a client/server architecture, and is now enhancing the architecture with the inclusion of publish/subscribe to provide a solid infrastructure that allows information integration from embedded devices to the cloud.
The OPC Foundation is working currently with 42 international (and many more to be added) suppliers that are developing products and solutions for the IIoT and needed to provide publish/subscribe to the technology portfolio to facilitate high-performance high reliable device application connectivity for this important market. Support for publish/subscribe as well as the client/server architecture provides a complete solution for any device or application. Existing applications already using OPC UA client/server communications can add the publish/subscribe features with minimal effort.
A demonstration of the OPC UA publish/subscribe functionality will be held at Hanover Fair the week of April 25 in the OPC Foundation Booth hall 9 – A11. This demonstration will consist of multiple vendors showing OPC UA enhanced with publish/subscribe, truly demonstrating how easy it is to have connectivity and information integration in IoT devices and applications. The demonstration will show both semantic and syntactic data interoperability.
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 6, 2016 | Automation, Operations Management, Workforce
Automation and people. Some people think that they are opposed to each other. A zero-sum game.
As I developed the editorial focus of the old Automation World, I wrote about how they actually go together. In the very first issue, I interviewed a Lean practitioner. I had to convince him. He told me that automation was bad. People could do better every time. Wait, I responded. Let’s not go overboard here. There are definitely things I’d rather have a machine and automation do for both consistency and safety reasons.
Sometimes a job is just boring. People lose attention. Either quality or safety suffers.
Smart Work Mindset
Tim Sowell’s latest blog post reminded me of that old discussion. The difference is, well aside from about 100 IQ points and that he’s contemplating while watching the Pacific, that he’s updated the idea while taking it to another level.
Consider:
[At] one company I was engaged with last week their thought pattern was still about replacing the personnel on the plant, going to total automation. While I agree with automation, it is required for consistently and velocity of production. But I struggle with agility.
Two days latter I was at another company and they were all about empowerment of people. They wanted to automate process and operations to free up people to add complimentary agility and “out of the box” thinking. As one C level said to me, our market is changing as fast as we ever seen.
Stepping back and looking at both these companies the second company was more automated than the first, and the second was investing in automation more than the first. But their attitude was to gain consistently and free up people from repeatable tasks, and increase the responsibility of people, and empower people to make decisions fast.
The diagram below really depicts what I started to introduce last week, and what this second company believed in.
Notice how he has applied the idea to agility. The automation mindset looks for consistency over a longer production run. The foundation of Lean is respect for people (and how their ideas improve the process). Sowell’s second company was “all about empowerment of people.”
He continues with the thought:
The key thinkers in the industry are not looking to dependency on 1 to 2 people, they are leveraging the concept of “crowd sourcing” thru a active community of people. As we look at the operational/ automation world of the future the key pillars will be:
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Ability to capture knowledge and intelligence into the system to automate process, and operations. Key is this is not just traditional automation in PLCs/ DCS etc, it is capturing repeatable knowledge and decisions. So the system must bread a culture of contribution and use natively.
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Ability to have a community of workers who can share collaborated “naturally” with ease, no matter the location of the users and state. Foundational to this is the ability trust the information, the measures so a common understanding of the situation, and basis for decision can be made.
Check out his blog. It’ll make you think. And that is a good thing.
