by Gary Mintchell | Aug 11, 2017 | Automation, Commentary
I wrote about FoxConn building a plant (maybe) in Wisconsin.
“Retired” Rockwell Automation Communications Director John Bernaden commented on my LinkedIn post of the article:
Good perspective Gary Mintchell. FoxConn’s been trying to replace its Chinese workers with automation and robotics for several years now with limited success. They’re realizing what’s no surprise to you — advanced systems integration of complex connected enterprises is extremely difficult. But FoxConn like too many at traditional IT companies underestimate these challenges and difficulties. In a related example, top Apple execs invited Rockwell’s CTO to a meeting in Cupertino a few years ago where they informed him that Apple planned to develop its own factory automation systems. Rockwell’s CTO literally laughed at their naïveté and politely left. Similarly Google acquired seven industrial robotics companies bragging in big New York Times articles about their X Division plan to produce armies of industrial robots. However they’ve quietly now sold or spun off most those industrial Robotics companies. The bottom line is that IT giants like Apple, Google, and FoxConn need traditional discrete automation companies like Rockwell, Siemens, GE and others to be successful.
John raises interesting points. IT programming often has some similar terminology to industrial automation—control loops, input/output, timers, and so forth. But the specific underlying technologies of industrial sensors and transmitters, industrial controllers, deterministic messaging, and the like make things much different.
I have been getting many behind the scenes looks at what Dell Technologies has been doing with Internet of Things in an industrial setting with its gateways and partnerships. Monday will find me in Houston, Texas, at a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) event looking at what HPE is doing in the same arena.
These IT companies have formulated a strategy of working from IT (CIO) down to the factory floor, whereas Rockwell Automation and Siemens are pursuing a similar end game with a strategy beginning in the plant and working up to enterprise.
This middle ground is the new battlefield.
Connecting the enterprise is where the action exists at this time. That’s why I named my blog The Manufacturing Connection.
Watch next week as I update what HPE is up to and catch up with someone I had several great conversations with while he was at National Instruments discussing Big Analog Data—Dr. Tom Bradicich.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 21, 2017 | Internet of Things, Security
When you begin connecting “things”, that is, data sources and data consumers, and exposing them to a network or the Internet, then cyber security assumes a role of primary importance. Or, at least it should assume such a role. Here is a slightly different take on Internet of Things data security.
Entrust Datacard, a provider of trusted identity and secure transaction technology solutions, has introduced Entrust Datacard ioTrust Security Solution. The solution delivers a secure and trusted digital infrastructure that safeguards data between devices, sensors, and backend platforms connected within an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. By applying digital identities managed through definable policy — the ioTrust Security Solution allows companies to do business in new ways and create the trusted products and experiences that these environments demand.
Today, digital businesses are striving to create new business models that turn stand-alone products into highly interactive and connected services, but are faced with a variety of challenges ranging from complicated integrations and extended deployment timelines to mitigating safety and privacy concerns. ioTrust is based on enterprise-grade encryption technologies and leverages Entrust Datacard’s 30 years of expertise in establishing identity-based, trusted infrastructures for the world’s most secure environments.
With capabilities such as identity, authentication and authorization, credential lifecycle management, and secure communications ioTrust helps organizations securely connect the people, applications and devices that power the connected world. ioTrust speeds deployment timelines, allowing organizations to more quickly realize business value in areas such as process optimization and automation, supply chain visibility, and delivery of new services. The Entrust Datacard ioTrust Security Solution is designed to secure IoT data across a variety of industries including industrial control systems, automotive, telecommunications and manufacturing supply chains.
“Unlike existing solutions that have been simply repurposed from IT environments, Entrust Datacard has spent several years working with customers and ecosystem partners to design a solution that recognizes the unique needs of IoT environments and incorporates sound security practices,” said Josh Jabs, vice president of PKI and IoT for Entrust Datacard. “We’ve created a solution that allows organizations to enhance their service offerings, improve the user experience and enable new business models while leveraging a trusted infrastructure.”
ioTrust Ensures a Trusted Internet of Things by:
- Enabling a secure and trusted ecosystem of people, applications and things throughout the IoT value chain
- Providing greater visibility into the security of the supply-chain, spanning from device manufacturer to the final product
- Reducing time-to-market and total cost of ownership by helping organizations to develop solutions based on heterogeneous device categories and profiles
- Empowering organizations to leverage existing infrastructures and devices, while supporting new products and services without the need to “rip and replace”
- Facilitating the secure and timely delivery of data and outcomes generated by trusted people, applications and things to the value-creation engine
For more information on Entrust Datacard ioTrust Security Solution and the specific industry use cases, visit .
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 20, 2017 | Internet of Things, Networking, Wireless
Connecting things to the Internet, or to the Cloud, or whatever app. The Internet of Things is nothing without connection. Almost every piece of news or interview I’ve seen or had over the past month or two has dealt with Internet of Things platforms. Here is news from a company new to me dealing with getting legacy devices into the system.
Amir Haleem, CEO of Helium, explained the technology and products with me yesterday in relation to an announcement regarding launch of its latest product suite.
This product suite is a comprehensive low-power, long-range networking solution for IoT devices. The new offering streamlines the ability to prototype, deploy and scale a long-range wireless network that connects thousands of end devices, giving companies a simple way to intelligently and securely deliver data from device to the cloud and application layer.
The system consists of end devices called Atom that are wireless (802.15.4, but in star not mesh topology) that attach to legacy sensors and field devices typically via serial. These connect to Access Points which in turn aggregate and send data to the cloud.
“Connectivity is extraordinarily complicated when dealing with resource-constrained embedded devices,” added Haleem. “Helium has taken a process that normally takes months of labor-intensive work from a large team and simplified it to a process that can be achieved in minutes with minimal staff, and provides the visibility and control needed to manage at scale going forward.”
Automating device management and updates through a central dashboard
As companies continue to build and scale their IoT deployments, it becomes especially crucial that they ensure full control and management of their operations. Helium allows companies to manage and update their systems from a central console, the Helium Dashboard, eliminating the need to visit every sensor in the field, which is a common challenge of remote field monitoring. Helium Dashboard also serves as a central point for Helium Channels, the setup and integration of the cloud applications and data stores used to assess and take action on these physical data.
“Although there has been great progress made in the areas of IoT hardware and cloud software, there are still major technical and economic challenges in getting connectivity to the edge point to gather and deliver data,” said Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst at Quocirca. “Simplifying and lowering costs of connectivity deployment would remove a significant barrier to mass IoT adoption in several industries.”
A new economic model for deploying, managing and scaling IoT networks
Helium will simplify everything that goes into purchasing, deploying and managing a long-range, low-power IoT solution, up-ending the traditional carrier-based model, which often does not provide reliable coverage where it is needed. It’s products will work out of the box with all existing sensor hardware and a wide range of IoT cloud applications with little-to-no configuration. With hardware as low as $19 per Helium Atom module, $29 per Element Access Point, and a simple $1.99 per month per installed Atom with no usage or data fees, Helium eliminates upcharges and most add-on costs. Helium’s open standards will ensure that it will support IoT hardware and software regardless of the IoT technology companies are using today or in the future.
Key features include:
• Zero configuration for simple installation and setup at scale
• Compatibility across hundreds of hardware providers
• Extremely long range connectivity, on the order of many city-blocks in dense urban applications and hundreds of square miles in sparse rural settings
• IEEE standards-based hardware provides maximum flexibility for changing business demands with no proprietary lock-in.
• Hardware-based security to ensure data is encrypted and devices authenticated, end to end
• Over-the-air updating and bi-directional communication to provide future-proofing, up-to-date software and further protection from security risks
• Helium Channels provide interoperability with all major cloud solution providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS IoT, and Google Cloud Platform IoT Core
• Full visibility and management enabled by Helium Dashboard
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 13, 2017 | Manufacturing IT, Technology
In 2030 every organization will be a technology organization and as such businesses need to start thinking today about how to future-proof their infrastructure and workforce, according to a report published by Dell Technologies. The research, led by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) alongside 20 technology, academic and business experts from across the globe, looks at how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality and cloud computing, will transform our lives and how we work over the next decade. The report, titled ‘The Next Era of Human-Machine Partnerships‘ also offers insight on how consumers and businesses can prepare for a society in flux.
Interesting thing about this report is that it is not simply Dell’s technology or market strategy wrapped in the guise of a “research” report like the typical analyst job.
The report forecasts that emerging technologies, supported by massive advancements in software, big data and processing power, will reshape lives. Society will enter a new phase in its relationship with machines, which will be characterized by:
- Even greater efficiency and possibility than ever before, helping humans transcend our limitations
- Humans as “digital conductors” in which technology will work as an extension of people, helping to better direct and manage daily activities
- Work chasing people, in which by using advanced data-driven matchmaking technologies, organizations can find and employ talent from across the world
- People learning “in the moment,” as the pace of change will be so rapid that new industries will be created and new skills will be required to survive
Dell Technologies commissioned the study to help companies navigate an uncertain world and prepare for the future. Today, digital disruption is ruthlessly redrawing industries. For the first time in modern history, global leaders can’t predict how their industry will fare further down the line. According to Dell’s Digital Transformation Index, 52 percent of senior decision makers across 16 countries have experienced significant disruption to their industries as a result of digital technologies. And nearly one in two businesses believe there’s a possibility their company will become obsolete within the next three to five years.
Not your usual analyst firm, Institute for the Future (IFTF) is an independent, nonprofit 501(c)(3) strategic research and educational organization celebrating nearly 50 years of forecasting experience. The core of our work is identifying emerging trends and discontinuities that will transform global society and the global marketplace. The Institute for the Future is based in Palo Alto, California.
IFTF relied on its decades-long study on the future of work and technology, in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, and the opinions and ideas generated during an all-day facilitated workshop with a diverse set of experts from across the globe.
They studied robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, augmented reality and virtual reality, and cloud computing with the goal of projecting the impacts of these technologies by 2030. I had the opportunity to talk with Liam Quinn, sr. vice president and CTO of Dell Technologies about this report and he added comments about the Internet of Things. More on that interview in my next reflection of the report.
“Never before has the industry experienced so much disruption. The pace of change is very real, and we’re now in a do-or-die landscape. To leap ahead in the era of human-machine partnerships, every business will need to be a digital business, with software at its core,” said Jeremy Burton, chief marketing officer, Dell. “But organizations will need to move fast and build capacity in their machines, ready their infrastructure and enable their workforce in order to power this change.”
“We’ve been exposed to two extreme perspectives about machines and the future: the anxiety-driven issue of technological unemployment or the over optimistic view that technology will cure all our social and environmental ills,” said Rachel Maguire, research director, Institute for the Future. “Instead we need to focus on what the new relationship between technology and people could look like and how we can prepare accordingly. If we engage in the hard work of empowering human-machine partnerships to succeed, their impact on society will enrich us all.”
Other report highlights include:
- In 2030 humans’ reliance on technology will evolve into a true partnership with humans, bringing skills such as creativity, passion and an entrepreneurial mindset. This will align with the machines’ ability to bring speed, automation and efficiencies, and the resulting productivity will allow for new opportunities within industries and roles.
- By 2030 personalized, integrated artificial intelligence (AI) assistants will go well beyond what assistants can do now. They’ll take care of us in predictive and automated ways.
- Technology won’t necessarily replace workers, but the process of finding work will change. Work will cease to be a place but a series of tasks. Machine learning technologies will make individuals’ skills and competencies searchable, and organizations will pursue the best talent for discrete tasks.
- An estimated 85 percent of jobs in 2030 haven’t been invented yet. The pace of change will be so rapid that people will learn “in-the-moment” using new technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality. The ability to gain new knowledge will be more valuable than the knowledge itself.
Exploring the technology areas:
Robotics—Buoyed by their commercial success, the adoption of robots will extend beyond manufacturing plants and the workplace. Family robots, caregiving robots, and civic robots will all become commonplace as deep learning improves robots’ abilities to empathize and reason.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning—According to Michelle Zhou, an expert in AI, development can be thought of in three stages. The first is recognition intelligence—algorithms that recognize patterns; followed by cognitive intelligence—machines that make inferences from data; with the final stage being virtual human beings. It is plausible that, by 2030, we will enter the second stage in AI as this technology progresses.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality—Despite the difference, both technologies represent a fundamental shift in information presentation because they allow people to engage in what Toshi Hoo, Director of IFTF’s Emerging Media Lab, calls “experiential media” as opposed to representative media. The information layer that both technologies create will accelerate the melding of digital and physical identities, with digital drails and traces forming a digital coating over individuals’ physical environments.
Cloud Computing—It’s important to recognize that Cloud Computing isn’t a place, it’s a way of doing IT. It is already in wide use. For example, Chitale Dairy (in India) launched a ‘cow to cloud’ initiative in which each cow is fitted with RFID tags to capture data that is held in the cloud. The relevant analysis of this data is then sent to the local farmers via SMS and the web, to alert farmers when they need to change the cows’ diet, arrange vaccinations, etc. The timely delivery of this information is increasing the cows’ yield, supporting local farmers, whose livelihoods depend on the dairy farms, and enabling Chitale to manage a part of the supply chain which is normally fraught with uncertainty.
You can also check out the Dell blog.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 5, 2017 | Automation, Internet of Things, Operations Management, Technology
Siemens Automation held its annual Users Conference the end of June at the Boca Raton Resort in Florida. Digitalization comprised the underlying theme, however connectivity technologies highlighted the important announcements and discussions.
MindSphere holds the top place as the most important Siemens technology at this time. Users and Siemens professionals highlighted two use cases at the conference both centering on condition monitoring / predictive maintenance.
The other connectivity announcement concerned PCS 7, the Siemens DCS. The company unveiled new I/O featuring Profinet connectivity. The new, denser I/O includes a user-configurable product, as well as traditional digital and analog modules. Ethernet connectivity featuring Profinet held center stage in the press announcement.
Siemens introduced MindSphere to me at Hannover 2016. Its evolution has been swift. Now dubbed an Internet of Things platform, it includes a set of APIs and libraries. It includes an “App Store” open to 3rd party developers in addition to Siemens apps. If you are a developer, just register and app and pay a royalty based on data or connections.
MindSphere placed in context is similar to what I’ve seen from Cisco, Dell EMC, GE, Microsoft, and SAP. I’m sure there are more and that we’ll see more in the future. Dell EMC’s platform is open source. MIMOSA, an industry standards organization provides a similar platform called the OIIE based on standards containing no proprietary components.
All of these platforms are important for maintenance and reliability professionals, as well as for plant management, engineering, and operations because of the increased data and visibility into operations and assets. This will result in improved planning, more efficient operations, and increased percentage of uptime.
Components of the platform include:
• MindSphere Apps – Siemens and 3rd party ; data analytics
• MindSphere Sphere – Azure, SAP, AWS, etc.
• MindSphere Connect – open standards, right now OPC UA, gateway, integrated with S7, build your own connectivity
