Smarter Manufacturing and Smart Spaces Start With Intelligence at the Edge
We’re living in a world where the things around us are becoming smarter. Thousands of internet of things (IoT) sensors on industrial equipment, embedded in city infrastructure and packaged into today’s products, are collecting data. That data helps unlock insights that can optimize operations, improve customer service and drive innovation.
It’s possible for a manufacturer, for example, to get advance warning of a glitch that could bring production to a halt, paving the way for proactive asset maintenance that helps avoid downtime. A transportation giant could get a window into a particular train route, enabling them to tweak schedules and make other adjustments to optimize occupancy and on-time performance. Even a modern city can get in on the data-driven transformation act: Imagine the impact of turning captured video and other data into specific actions and policies that promote safety and reduce crime. Moving intelligence to the edge can dramatically reduce costs of data transmission, reduce latency for faster responses and automation, and help protect privacy by sending only metadata over the air and processing raw data at the device itself.
Despite the advantages and benefits, actually implementing intelligence at the edge is harder than it sounds. As the data landscape becomes more varied and voluminous and the use cases more complex, there’s a need to rethink the data architecture to support these next-generation applications. Instead of centralizing the management and orchestration of IoT data and analytics workflows in an on-premises data center or in the cloud, enterprises need to move to a model built around providing greater intelligence in the moment at the edge.
To address the challenge, Hitachi Vantara has launched updates to its software and hardware solutions that enable intelligence at the edge: Hitachi’s Lumada Edge Intelligence and Hitachi Edge Gateway.
Lumada Edge Intelligence is a hardware-agnostic software platform that securely connects, collects, routes and stores myriad data types. It powers actionable, real-time insights at critical operating sites for faster and better data-driven decision-making.
Hitachi Edge Gateway is a configurable hardware device. It ingests, analyzes, stores, transcodes and compresses data from multiple sensors, like video, lidar and audio sensors, before transmitting the right data or metadata via Wi-Fi or cellular.
By combining consulting services, in-depth industry domain expertise and an open ecosystem of strategic partners, Hitachi Vantara delivers both end-to-end edge intelligence solutions and key components. We help organizations reinvent business for a smarter future. (Our edge solution updates are part of a broader announcement of an expanded set of offerings to help manufacturers accelerate Manufacturing 4.0 initiatives and to assist with safely restarting production in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.)
In a traditional architecture, data is piped over a wired or wireless connection to a centralized data repository.
