An open-systems consortium grows and a pair of edge players formalize their partnership

Smart Embedded Computing’s customers, meanwhile, deploy its hardware in a broad spectrum of settings, including government systems and transportation markets, as well as in missions including artificial intelligence and industrial IoT.

Members of the SOSA Consortium see the market for these sensors growing faster by enabling the development of agile and interoperable products. It certainly would make sourcing, manufacturing, and maintenance of sensor-based systems more efficient.

Open electronics and information systems of almost any kind have perceived shortcomings. From a revenue perspective, proprietary works can win their manufacturers more revenue if for no other reason than makers can charge more to service and support protected intellectual property.

Some skeptics of open systems express concern about security and consistency in the presentation and operation of non-proprietary products. It is harder to assure buyers that software, for instance, that is essentially developed by groups of developers.

And consistency can be hard to maintain, as is the case with Android phones. Hardware makers using the Android mobile operating system have many versions of it from which to choose. Android itself is based on a modified version of the open-source Linux kernel. The result is that few Android phone vendors offer the same set of features and capabilities.

The SOSA Consortium, on the other hand, is building momentum and confidence in its open approach in part through the strong stance the U.S. military forces have taken in joining together to require sensor systems to operate within a common, open framework.

Partnering for IoT systems in Germany

Finding a technological kindred spirit in a more intimate fashion, Harting Technology Group and Expleo Germany GmbH announced a partnership to develop industrial data-controlled services and IoT systems.

Harting makes a modular edge-computing system called the MICA. This hardware pulls information from production lines, analyzes the data and can share it with an engineer, as one example. The engineer can view the data on their phone or tablet as statistics and trend lines pertinent to the machinery without having to log on to a cloud service. It also can be set up to directly connect to the cloud.

The MICA, which boasts reconfigurable hardware components, uses open software that executives at Harting say can still be used to create proprietary content.

For its part, Expleo is a technology consultancy and software maker. One of its applications, called SmartAnimo, is capable of learning the expected behavior of connected manufacturing lines and standalone machines. From there, the software finds problems in operations without human help and, potentially, before facility efficiency can take a hit.

Article Topics

edge computing  |  edge servers  |  IIoT  |  IoT  |  sensors