IIoT Platforms

GE’s Predix, Siemen’s MindSphere, and the recently announced Honeywell Sentience are likely to be on any short list of industrial cloud platforms. But they aren’t the only ones in this space. Cisco’s Jasper, IBM’s Watson IoT, Meshify, Uptake, and at least 20 others are competing to manage all those billions of sensors that are expected to encompass the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

Sample providers: Amazon AWS, AT&T M2X, Bosch IoT, Carriots, Cumulocity, GE Predix, IBM Watson IoT, Google Cloud IoT Core, Intel IoT, Cisco Jasper, Losant IoT, Microsoft Azure, PTC ThingWorx (connected to Windchill/PDMLink), SAP Hana Cloud, Thethings.io, C3IoT, Uptake, Amplia IoT, XMPRO, Meshify, TempoIQ, Bitstew Systems, Siemens MindSphere, AirVantage, Honeywell Sentience, Schneider Electric’s Ecostruxure, Alibaba Cloud will roll out its big-data service, called “MaxCompute”, and Parker Hannifin’s Voice of the Machine IoT platform.

GE Predix: is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) specifically designed for industrial data and analytics. It can capture and analyze the unique volume, velocity and variety of machine data within a highly secure, industrial-strength cloud environment. GE Predix is designed to handle data types that consumer cloud services are not built to handle.

Siemens MindSphere is an open platform, based on the SAP HANA (PaaS) cloud, which allows developers to build, extend, and operate cloud-based applications. OEMs and application developers can access the platform via open interfaces and use it for services and analysis such as the online monitoring of globally distributed machine tools, industrial robots, or industrial equipment such as compressors and pumps. MindSphere also allows customers to create digital models of their factories with real data from the production process.

Honeywell Sentience is the recently announced cloud infrastructure by Honeywell Process Solutions. It is a secure, scalable, standards-based “One Honeywell” IoT platform, that will be able to accelerate time-to-market of connected solutions, lower the cost-to-market, and enable new innovative SaaS business models. It will have the ability to run global security standards embedded throughout the solution and make applications that are plug & play and scalable.

C3 IoT is a PaaS that enables organizations to leverage data – telemetry from sensors and devices, data from diverse enterprise information systems, and data from external sources (such as social media, weather, traffic, and commodity prices) – and employ advanced analytics and machine learning at scale, in real time, to capture business insights for improved operations, enhanced customer engagement, and differentiated products and services. C3 IoT is led by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Thomas Siebel. It has closed deals with the U.S. State Department and the French utility ENGIE SA, based on C3 IoT’s focus on machine-generated data.

Uptake: is a predictive analytics SaaS platform provider that offers industrial companies the ability to optimize performance, reduce asset failures, and enhance safety. Uptake integrates data science and workflow connectivity to provide high-value solutions using massive data sets. In 2015, it entered into a partnership with heavy construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar to jointly develop an end-to-end platform for predictive diagnostics in order to help Caterpillar customers monitor and optimize their fleets more effectively.

Meshify is an Industrial IoT platform for tracking, monitoring, analyzing devices. The Meshify suite of tools provides all the features needed to deploy, monitor, control, and analyze the results of an IoT solution. Despite being a young technology business, it has a growing portfolio of clients with industrial-oriented companies, including Henry Pump, Sierra Resources, Stallion Oilfield Services, Gems Sensors & Controls and MistAway Systems.

http://www.iotcentral.io/

Eclipse Kapua

Eclipse Kapua, combines with the existing Eclipse Kura project to offer IoT developers and end users an open platform for end-to-end IoT implementations. Kura will provide the Java/OSGi-based gateway management needed for Kapua, and Kapua will be able to natively manage Kura gateways. Kapua will also use Eclipse Hono (more info) for its messaging infrastructure, Eclipse hawkBit (more info), which provides the infrastructure for artifact repository and software distribution, Eclipse Leshan (more info) for the machine-to-machine protocol, and Eclipse Paho (more info) for the MQTT. MQTT is a machine-to-machine (M2M)/”Internet of Things” connectivity protocol. It was designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport.

OpenStack

OpenStack is a set of software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private clouds. The cloud is all about providing computing for end users in a remote environment, where the actual software runs as a service on reliable and scalable servers rather than on each end-user’s computer. Cloud computing can refer to a lot of different things, but typically the industry talks about running different items “as a service”—software, platforms, and infrastructure. OpenStack falls into the latter category and is considered Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Providing infrastructure means that OpenStack makes it easy for users to quickly add new instance, upon which other cloud components can run. Typically, the infrastructure then runs a “platform” upon which a developer can create software applications that are delivered to the end users.