by Gary Mintchell | Mar 6, 2017 | Automation, Internet of Things, Operations Management, Security
When all things are connected, security becomes the crucial yet often overlooked component of the plan. Dell EMC as an enterprise IT supplier is long familiar with the necessity for planning security. This addition to its IoT Partner Network adds another dimension to its secure IoT offering. We have watched Dell EMC steadily building its IoT presence over the past couple of years. The gateway concept with computing at the edge is really catching on.
Asavie, the provider of next-generation enterprise mobility management and Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity solutions, announced today at the Industry of Things World it has joined the Dell IoT Solutions Partner Program as an Associate Technology Partner.
Asavie PassBridge cloud-hosted platform delivers on-demand IoT services that manage and secure connectivity across diverse networks, at scale. In combination with Dell Edge Gateways , Asavie PassBridge provides enterprises with end-to-end control of their network connectivity to ensure the commercial success of their IoT projects. It enables enterprises to rapidly rollout IoT projects, and securely capture and manage the vast amounts of data transacted between IoT devices.
Welcoming the announcement, Lars Jerkland, Vice President, OEM for Asavie, said, “We are pleased to be part of Dell’s growing network of IoT Partners. Customers are struggling with IoT network connectivity and integration challenges and our work with Dell helps address these obstacles. Together, Asavie and Dell offer industrial customers a secure, seamless, end-to-end IoT connectivity experience without any of the potential delays typically associated with rolling out a global cellular project.”
“Dell is focused on providing our customers with a comprehensive IoT solution to help them build new business models and grow,” said Jeff Brown, Dell EMC vice president, Global IoT and Embedded PC Sales, OEM Solutions. “Dell’s Edge Gateways and Asavie PassBridge, provide customers with a scalable, secure and robust IoT solution. As a result, enterprises can accelerate IoT implementation, generating increased cost savings and rapid delivery of new services to market,” continued Brown.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 23, 2017 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT
The afternoon stream I moderated at the Industry of Things World conference focused on connected vehicles—Construction Equipment, Trucks, Airplanes. I also interviewed a farm equipment manufacturer about some perhaps surprising uses of data-driven decision making in agriculture.
But first, a thought from another keynote address:
From a NASA study—If you want to employ a creative genius, you’ll have 98% success employing a 3-5 year old; if you hire an adult, you probability of success drops to 2%.
Data-Driven Agriculture
I caught up with Alexander Purdy of John Deere between sessions. He’s not an engineer or IT manager like many of the attendees and speakers (he had a later keynote). He on the business end. How can John Deere grab a competitive advantage and serve customers through connected data? After a career as a consultant, he loves actually doing things.
His group deals in guidance systems and digital solutions. Guidance systems essentially link a GPS to large farm equipment. Not only does this ensure the rows of corn are nice and straight, the digital decision making increases coverage and yield.
Deere’s digital solutions include online JDLink, JDonline, and an ops center. A farmer can sit in her office and plot out planting regimes setting up everything before going into the field. There is even a way to collaborate on methods and local information.
Let’s take seeding for example. Sensors connected back to the system can feedback soil conditions. This helps the planter decide for each seed in a cornfield the optimum x, y, and z (yes, they measure depth of planted seed). The idea is to get each plant to grow at about the same rate.
Connected Construction Equipment
Kjell Jespersen, Caterpillar, spoke on huge construction equipment. Customers have been using the large amount of data generated by construction equipment mainly for improving maintenance. However, they crave better productivity data to manage their business. Developing the systems for gathering and analyzing all the data will become crucial as a competitive advantage—or failure to do so could force a company to exit the business.
Connected Trucking
Turning to the long-haul trucking business, companies are turning to truck suppliers such as Volvo and Mack Trucks to provide connected vehicle technology to provide data for improved customer support. According to Evandro Silva, Manager Connected Vehicle Services, Volvo Group Trucks North America, a telematics solution was used to develop a connected service that enables quick diagnosis of issues, proactive scheduling for repairs, and confirmation that needed parts are in stock and ready to install—all while the truck is still on the job.
Airplane Digital Twin
Robert Rencher, Senior Systems Engineer and Associate Technical Fellow, The Boeing Company, took the discussion to a new level—literally. From equipment that stays firmly on the ground, Rencher discussed the role of a “digital twin” throughout the lifecycle of an aircraft. A digital twin is defined within a system representing the characteristics of the object and the virtual environment in which the digital representation of objects and their physical equivalent, vice versa, are represented digitally and co-exist such that the object’s past, current, and future capabilities and can be assessed and evaluated in real-time. As an object progresses through each phase of its lifecycle, various systems interface with the digital twin.
Next Year
Look for information about next year’s conference and all the other conferences. Next year will be about the same time of year in San Diego. Details are still being worked out. Check out twitter conversations at #IoTClan
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 9, 2017 | Internet of Things
Much is written about the Industrial Internet of Things, but is anyone really doing anything with it?
Well, yes, it is real and solving business problems for manufacturers. But too few are taking advantage of leveraging the technology for achieving business benefit. I have been in sessions with managers and engineers seeking a plan of implementation.
So last week I welcomed in the New Year with a conversation with Maciej (Mah-chek) Kranz, author of “Building the Internet of Things: Implement New Business Models, Disrupt Competitors, Transform Your Industry.”
Kranz, Vice President of the Corporate Strategic Innovation Group at Cisco Systems, leads the team focused on incubating new businesses, accelerating internal innovation, and driving co—innovation with customers, partners, and startups. Prior to this he was General Manager of Cisco’s Connected Industries Group, where he drove IoT businesses for key industrial markets.
He told me that he wants people to understand the changes coming due to the IIoT and make the book practical and helpful. He succeeded in that goal. The book contains many examples of Industrial Internet of Things in practice along with practical leadership and implementation advice. While there is some technical discussion, this is not a book for engineering rather it is targeted to line of business leaders, people who solve business problems, and IT leaders as well as engineering leadership.
As I read the book, though, I got the impression that much of what Kranz is calling IIoT was once called “manufacturing IT.” Such is the morphing of terminology.
I have talked with leaders who are trying to build business cases and implement an Industrial Internet of Things strategy. Their experiences merge with Kranz’ observations that the biggest barrier to implementation is cultural. Any of us who are change agents and have tried implementing new technologies and new ways of working can show the scars earned from learning that barrier the hard way.
But the potential benefits are huge. For example, this quote from an executive of Harley Davidson, “What used to take a painfully long time to triage and troubleshoot now can be accomplished in a single morning,” the manager said, “An order of magnitude improvement.”
Kranz is not bashful about proclaiming why you should implement IIoT—“Like it of not, the Internet of Things (IoT) will change your organization unlike anything before. It isn’t just the next big thing. IoT is the future.”
He continues, “The real payoff from IoT comes down to automating existing processes that have a large labor or time component and streamlining the related process in one way or another.”
Here is another quote from the book, “You belong to Generation IoT if you embrace open standards, open collaboration, open communications, and open, flexible business models and you’re willing to assemble a comprehensive partner ecosystem to build and deploy agile, flexible business solutions.”
On the practical side, here are his eight elements of success
- Start with strategy, planning, and preparation.
- Secure C-suite sponsorship
- Build a diverse team
- Communicate and drive IT/OT convergence
- Rethink operations from the ground up
- Design for flexibility
- Educate and train
- Revisit repeatedly-it’s not a one-and-done effort
Kranz concludes with words that echo my belief in Lean—that it isn’t a strategy but more of a way of life. He says, “Most importantly, my hope is that IoT will change the way you think about your business, and how you’ll design, plan, develop, and deliver products and services, go to market, and interact with customers.”
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 15, 2016 | News, Operations Management, Software
Data Science has gotten us to the point of collecting servers full of manufacturing data. We can do some analytics. But there are miles to go before we sleep.
This press release crossed my email stream last week. I haven’t time to interview the founder–that will come later. But here is a teaser.
Data Science Pioneer Drew Conway Closes $2.5M in Seed Funding to Bring Machine Learning to Industrial Operations
New venture Alluvium delivers “Mesh Intelligence” to close the machine-to-human gap
Alluvium, developers of Mesh Intelligence solutions that harness machine learning insights for real-time applications in industrial use cases, today announced $2.5 million in seed funding led by investors IA Ventures, Lux Capital, and Bloomberg Beta. The machine learning venture is running pilot projects of its Mesh Intelligence technology in fleet management, and oil and gas, among other vertical industrial applications.
Alluvium aims to conquer one of big data’s greatest unsolved challenges for complex industrial operations with expert human operators. Alluvium’s breakthrough Mesh Intelligence solution frees the data from these proprietary systems, transforms it into rich information streams, and provides real-time insights to human operators for immediate action.
“The commoditized big data stack is fundamentally broken for complex industrial operations,” said Drew Conway, Founder and CEO at Alluvium. “Modern industrial assets and hardware are continuing to be instrumented by OEMs who have not considered how these heterogeneous streams of machine data should be leveraged in the overall workflow and data strategy of the organization. And the modern analytics ‘stack’ — where data is moved and crunched in back end systems — does not meet the real-time requirements of human operators at the edge.”
Conway, who earned his PhD at NYU, is a leading expert in the application of computational methods to social and behavioral problems at large-scale. He started his career in counter-terrorism as a computational social scientist in the U.S. intelligence community and is known for his venn diagram definition of data science as well as applying data science to study human decision making.
At the core of Alluvium’s Mesh Intelligence platform is unique technology for extracting data from all elements of complex industrial operations — tablets, sensors, as well as industry-specific assets — with no expectations of compute resources or network bandwidth. This breakthrough allows machine learning processing to occur at the edge of systems where human operators need data most — in-real time.
“The early days of big data were about capturing and storing the vast amounts of new information streaming from devices in manufacturing, transport, medicine and more,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudera, and a seed investor in Alluvium. “As that technology has matured, the more important and more interesting problem has become: What can we learn from all that data? Alluvium is focused on extracting meaning from streaming data coming from hardware that instruments all sorts of industries. The company augments human expertise with its powerful machine learning technology to make customers smarter and help them operate better.”
Independent research and surveys show the massive economic opportunity for IoT and machine learning across industrial use cases. A report by Jabil found that “$1.9 trillion dollars of economic value could be created by the use of IoT devices and asset tracking solutions.” For U.S. oil and gas suppliers — an industry where Alluvium has had significant early traction — the daily cost of unplanned downtime at a refinery can reach $1.7 million per day, and the daily cost of unplanned downtime for liquid natural gas drillers can top $11 million per day. A recent McKinsey report found that “car data monetization could be as high as $750 billion by 2030” — which has far-reaching implications for fleet management. Analyst firm Gartner forecasted more than 6 billion connected devices will be in use worldwide in 2016 supporting more than $265 billion in services. And in a 2015 “Moving Toward the Future of the Industrial Internet” report by GE and Accenture, 84% of executives expected Big Data to shift the competitive landscape within the next year.
“Bringing machine intelligence into the physical world is an incredibly difficult task,” said Shivon Zilis, partner at Bloomberg Beta. “We were excited to back Alluvium because of their unique insights into how complex industrial systems could be transformed by predictive engines.”
Learn More
Read Alluvium Founder’s Perspective on Starting the Company
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 14, 2016 | Automation, Internet of Things, News, Operations Management, Organizations, Technology
A useful Internet of Things (IoT) requires interoperability; and, interoperability requires testing to assure that thing work together. Here is news of a test lab for IPv6.
The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), an independent provider of broad-based testing and standards conformance services for the networking industry, has announced the launch of the Internet of Things (IoT) IP Testing Services. Created to offer custom Internet Protocol (IP) test services for IoT products specific to home environments, industrial networks, smart cities, and connected cars, the group will help improve IoT interoperability, reducing time-to-market and enhancing the customer experience. The IoT IP Testing Services will also offer testing for the IPv6 Ready IoT Logo launching in Spring 2017.
“As the world becomes increasingly connected and demand for IoT devices grows, companies are facing the challenge of how best to ensure interoperability, functionality, and security, while maximizing quality of experience for customers,” said Timothy Winters, Senior Executive, Software and IP networking, UNH-IOL. “The UNH-IOL IoT IP Testing Services provide a competitive advantage by enabling emerging IoT companies to validate their devices through trusted, third-party interoperability testing.”
One of the first labs approved to issue the IPv6 Forum’s IPv6 Ready logo, UNH-IOL’s IoT IP Testing Services deliver access to a multimillion-dollar test bed, custom IP testing services, and an array of networking experts with more than 60 years of combined experience in IPv6 protocols and testing. Emerging loT companies will gain competitive benefits from the group’s services, such as increased confidence in interoperability between security functionality, and accelerated market deployment cycles.
“Operators’ networks will need to evolve in order to address the coming IoT opportunity, and consider how security will play a role in IoT configuration agility and smart service flexibility for vertical industries,” said Lancen LaChance, Vice President Product Management, GlobalSign. “Ensuring IoT device security and identity is essential, as illustrated by recent DDoS attacks. By having their devices validated through the IoT IP Testing Services, IoT device manufacturers can be certain their products are optimized for and compliant with operator security requirements and changing network conditions.”
The IPv6 Forum is developing an IPv6 Ready Logo specifically for the IoT market. The logo validates basic IPv6 functionality, addressing privacy, and domain name system (DNS) services. This extensible service will have the ability to address future security request for comments (RFCs) such as data transport layer security (DTLS), Lightweight IKEv2, and simple certificate enrollment protocol (SCEP). Beginning in spring 2017, the IoT IP Testing Services will begin offering testing for the IPv6 Ready Logo to companies demonstrating verified protocol implementation and validated interoperability between IPv6 products. The IPv6 Ready Logo serves as a marketing Logo l, giving consumers the confidence of interoperability when purchasing new devices.
“Ensuring IoT devices operate correctly in different settings is essential for IoT manufacturers to meet new customer demand,” said David Blaine, Lead Software Engineer, Hayward Industries, Inc. “From TVs to game consoles to thermostats, there is an influx of consumer-based IoT products already reaching the marketplace. With access to extensive test beds at the UNH-IOL, manufacturers can ensure their products function as designed in the environments in which they will be deployed.”
For more information on the IPv6 Ready logo or the IoT IP Testing Services, please visit http://bit.ly/IoTIPTestingServices.
For additional information, please view the UNH-IOL IoT IP Testing Services Press Conference.
About the UNH-IOL
Founded in 1988, the UNH-IOL provides independent, broad-based interoperability and standards conformance testing for data, telecommunications and storage networking products and technologies. Combining extensive staff experience, standards-bodies participation and a 28,000+ square foot facility, the UNH-IOL helps companies efficiently and cost effectively deliver products to the market.
