Faircom expands offerings with new edge computing solutions for Industry 4.0
Faircom, a provider of database management systems, has recently released two edge offerings – the Faircom Edge and Faircom MQ. The company intends to provide edge database management solutions to Industry 4.0.
“We realized a few years ago there was a skills gap at the edge. Building end-to-end edge ecosystems is rife with data problems, and solving data problems is what we know and do best,” says Alysha Brown, the chief operating officer at FairCom. “By embedding a database within our solutions, we’ve created a reliable, robust IIoT platform to bring factories into Industry 4.0.”
According to the company, the Faircom Edge platform runs efficiently on lightweight edge gateways. The transformation engine allows the data to “transform” from one protocol to another. The company says this end-to-end industrial IoT platform helps businesses improve system interoperability.
“Our company has evolved into new markets — namely, edge computing,” Brown says. “And we want our clients to evolve alongside us.”
Meanwhile, the Faircom MQ is an MQTT broker enabling communication between clients. Faircom says the MQTT solution differs from traditional brokers since it offers an embedded database. This feature has persistent messaging capabilities, meaning messages are stored in the database and can be sent to subscribers even if they are not connected to the broker.
Faircom additionally believes that organizations often struggle with operational and information technology interoperability. To tackle this issue, the company’s edge solution aims to reduce the entry barrier to industrial automation and address data management issues within the embedded IoT ecosystem.
Analysis
The integration of OT and IT systems has been a topic of discussion for some time. It has gained even more attention with the growth of the IoT and connected devices as part of digital transformation efforts. There has been a vast influx of edge data from thousands of edge devices deployed at remote locations, and managing the data has become challenging, a challenge that is often complicated by the use of different protocols and data formats by these devices.
IoT gateways aren’t a new concept. A number of vendors offer systenms that can perform protocol bridging, which is the process of converting data from one protocol to another. This is important because of the range of proprietary protocols still in use in industrial applications, for instance.
The Faircom Edge industrial IoT software platform goes a step further by taking advantage of a high performance, high availability embedded SQL/No SQL database (which doesn’t add a database management requirement, according to the company).
The database enables the persistence of data, which in turn enables data transformation. Data transformation means a developer can change the format or structure of data without changing the underlying protocol. For instance, an IoT gateway can transform raw sensor data into a more useful format such as JSON or CSV that can be easily processed by cloud applications such as machine learning for improving manufacturing quality. This capability, in conjunction with Faircom’s low code/no-code development capabilities gives customers more options for realizing their digital transformation efforts as compared to traditional IoT gateways.
Article Topics
AI/ML | edge database | embedded | Faircom | Industry 4.0 | IoT gateway | low-code | MQTT | No SQL | no-code | SQL
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