by Gary Mintchell | Nov 2, 2018 | Internet of Things
One of the most important technologies for successful implementation of an Industrial Internet of Things program involves moving more computing and storage power to the edge.
GE has been in the news more often than it would like over the past year—my broker just called and in our discussion I mentioned writing an article about GE and he groaned.
However, GE Digital despite rumors to the contrary still lives and released some new products. One is an edge solution and the other an on-prem server solution.
Predix Edge aims at simplifying edge-to-cloud computing. GE Digital also introduced its Predix Private Cloud (PPC) solution, an on-premises deployment of the Predix platform, which gives customers the privacy, security, data sovereignty, and data isolation provided by a private cloud infrastructure.
“More than 70 percent of industrial companies are stuck in pilot purgatory – that is, they are either still at the start or unable to further advance their IIoT initiatives,” said Eddie Amos, Corporate VP, Platform & Industrial Applications, GE Digital. “Companies often face unexpected complexities in the solution design or integration, steep costs or security vulnerabilities. The custom, one-off solutions that tend to grow out of pilot projects further burden companies with ongoing maintenance, patching and upgrading over time. Realizing the full impact of IIoT requires moving beyond the pilot stage with scalable, interoperable solutions – and GE Digital helps lead them through that journey.”
The offerings GE Digital unveiled help companies bridge this gap – and offer businesses flexibility when and where they operate.
Predix Edge securely captures, processes, and analyzes data that can be managed locally or pushed to the cloud, executing the most demanding workloads at the edge and producing insights in near real time. With new functionality to help businesses accelerate the IIoT, Predix Edge provides:
Simple deployment and management capabilities out of the box, allowing users to remotely monitor and manage all their edge devices and heterogenous industrial data from a centralized management console.
Rapid time to value by supporting edge application development for almost all programming languages – such as Java, C++, Go and Python – and coming pre-integrated for use with GE Digital’s leading industrial apps like Asset Performance Management (APM) and Operations Performance Management (OPM).
Support for data storage and analysis online, offline or with intermittent connectivity in remote environments, such as offshore oil rigs or disconnected use cases where internet connectivity is never available. Predix Edge then transfers key data back to the cloud when re-connected.
Edge-to-cloud security and compliance to protect data and operations. The hardened, embedded edge operating system helps manage connected devices and remotely deploy patches, giving users the ability to control security at a deeper level.
Low latency application deployment closer to the originating data, to enable companies with limited connectivity, regulatory requirements or other constraints a way to accelerate time to value.
Processing data and applying analytics close to the device can dramatically reduce downtime, optimize maintenance schedules, and add operational value, all while reducing network and cloud costs. Predix Edge and the Predix platform work seamlessly together to provide distributed IIoT processing and analytics where they’re needed most.
To further help simplify the IIoT process, GE Digital also unveiled Predix Private Cloud (PPC), an on-premises deployment of the Predix platform and portfolio, that offers companies maximum levels of security and privacy.
Already commercially available, PPC enables IIoT connectivity, data, analytics and applications – such as Predix applications or custom applications – to be hosted on-premises, providing customers with multiple ways to deploy the Predix platform. The on-premises offering helps companies operating in high data volume scenarios access data securely in near real time and also manage edge and disconnected environments. PPC is specifically designed to meet privacy, security, data sovereignty anddata isolation requirements based on a customer’s industry, region or country.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 31, 2015 | Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software
Tim Sowell writes weekly on operations management. His last blog post refers back to one of mine (thank you) and then adds a deep insight.
My post concerned adoption of cloud and the movement toward private clouds. A survey revealed that manufacturing leads the way in cloud adoption.
Tim says:
The above learnings and results do not surprise me, based upon my own engagements in the field, and observing the increased realization that speed of change is important, and tradition large projects are going out the door. Replaced by rapid projects leveraging existing expertise in the industry and adding through own operational process value to differentiate.
How does the cloud help us? As a major component of new platform technologies it enables speed of change, flexibility, collecting existing expertise.
These are important whether you are in engineering, operations, or maintenance. In fact, these disciplines continue to blend, don’t they? The new platforms building on all these new technologies will force management teams to reformulate their department silos and achieve greater results through cross-fertilization of expertise of teams.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 26, 2015 | Data Management, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software
Cisco just released the findings of a global study that indicates cloud is moving into a second wave of adoption, with companies no longer focusing just on efficiency and reduced costs, but rather looking to cloud as a platform to fuel innovation, growth and disruption.
The study finds that 53 percent of companies expect cloud to drive increased revenue over the next two years. Unfortunately, this will be challenging for many companies as only 1 percent of organizations have optimized cloud strategies in place while 32 percent have no cloud strategy at all.
The Cisco-sponsored InfoBrief “Don’t Get Left Behind: The Business Benefits of Achieving Greater Cloud Adoption” was developed by International Data Corporation (IDC) and is based on primary market research conducted with executives responsible for IT decisions in 3,400 organizations across 17 countries that are successfully implementing private, public and hybrid clouds in their IT environments.
Nick Earle, Senior Vice President, Global Cloud and Managed Services Sales, Cisco, said, “As we talk with customers interested in moving to the second wave of cloud, they are far more focused on private and hybrid cloud—Primarily because they realize that private and hybrid offer the security, performance, price, control and data protection organizations are looking for during their expanded efforts. This observation, which drove our strategy to build a portfolio of private and hybrid infrastructure and as-a-service solutions, is reflected in the new IDC study, which shows that 44 percent of organizations are either currently using or have plans to implement private cloud and 64 percent of cloud adopters are considering hybrid cloud.”
In the study IDC identifies five levels of cloud maturity: ad hoc, opportunistic, repeatable, managed and optimized. The study found that organizations elevating cloud maturity from the ad hoc, the lowest level to optimized, the highest, results dramatic business benefits, including:
- revenue growth of 10.4 percent
- reduction of IT costs by 77 percent
- shrinking time to provision IT services and applications by 99 percent
- boosting IT department’s ability to meet SLAs by 72 percent
- doubling IT department’s ability to invest in new projects to drive innovation.
The study also quantified the economic benefits the most mature cloud organizations are realizing. Organizations studied are gaining an average of $1.6 million in additional revenue per application deployed on private or public cloud. They are also achieving $1.2 million in cost reduction per cloud-based application.
The revenue increases were largely the result of sales of new products and services, gaining new customers, or selling into new markets. Organizations were able to attribute revenue gains to increased innovation resulting from the shifting of IT resources from traditional maintenance activities to new, more strategic, more innovative initiatives.
Operational cost reductions associated with cloud stem from the advantages to the business of running on a more scalable, reliable, and higher-performing environment. These include improved agility, increased employee productivity, risk mitigation, infrastructure cost savings and open source benefits.
Private Cloud’s Correlation
Private cloud allows better resource use, greater scale, and faster time to respond to requests, but with the added control and security of dedicated resources for a single company.
Adopting hybrid cloud can be more complex than adopting other forms of cloud. It requires workload portability, security, and policy enablement. These requirements were evident in the study, which showed that up to 70 percent of respondents expect to migrate data between public and private clouds (or among multiple cloud providers) and have high security and policy requirements.
Mature Cloud Adoption by Country
Mature cloud adoption varies by country, with the United States and Latin America among the countries with the greatest percentage of organizations with repeatable, managed or optimized cloud strategies, and Japan with the fewest among the countries studied. The study notes the percentage of organizations with mature cloud adoption in each country:
- 34 percent USA
- 29 percent Latin America Region
- 27 percent UK
- 22 percent France
- 21 percent Germany
- 19 percent Australia
- 19 percent Canada
- 18 percent Korea
- 17 percent The Netherlands
- 9 percent Japan
Cloud Adoption by Industry
By industry, manufacturing has the largest percentage of companies in one of the top three adoption categories at 33 percent, followed by IT (30 percent), finance (29 percent), and healthcare (28 percent). The lowest adoption levels by industry were found to be government/education and professional services (at 22 percent each) and retail/wholesale (at 20 percent). By industry, professional services, technology, and transportation, communications, and utilities expected the greatest impact on key performance indicators (KPIs) across the board.
Cisco Business Cloud Advisor Adoption Report, Tool and Workshop
Cisco is helping customers translate the findings of this study into customized reports for customers. These Cisco Business Cloud Advisor engagements come in two formats, a simple, survey-based tool and a more in-depth workshop.
The Adoption Report allows customers to go through a structured survey to determine their own cloud adoption maturity and associated business benefits relative to their industry peers—by industry, company size and geography.
The Adoption Tool and Workshop allows Cisco and qualified channel partner sales teams to bring a much deeper level of analysis to organizations. The half-day workshop will help organizations better measure the potential impact of cloud adoption on their IT organizations across a broad range of key performance indicators. The recommendations include vendor agnostic guidance regarding how organizations can evolve their cloud journey across a number of domains, including the Intercloud. The Adoption Tool and Workshop are currently being rolled out on a worldwide basis.
The Cisco Business Cloud Advisor Adoption Report, Tool and Workshop are based on the same unbiased primary market research conducted by IDC for the study.
