New ideas about legacy systems

June 6, 2017

"I can't wait to see what IT/OT convergence will bring to industry."

Opto 22’s Matt Newton recently presented the webinar “Update Your Legacy Systems with the IIoT.” Today the director of technical marketing provides a preview of the presentation.

Opto 22's Matt Newton

Smart Industry: What are the challenges with actually putting OEE applications into play?

Matt: How to share information between OT and IT systems. A lot of legacy operations technology was never designed to interface to IT systems. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that there are already hardware and software tools available, like Node-RED, RESTful APIs and edge-computing platforms to start connecting these systems. What’s even more interesting is that a lot of these tools are coming out of open-source initiatives, which means it’s easy to get started with them without having to invest a lot of time or money.

Smart Industry: Where are we at with communication/integration standards with the IIoT?

Matt: One of the recent developments on the communication/integration standards front is the creation of the EdgeX Foundry, an open-source project hosted by The Linux Foundation, building a common open framework for IoT edge computing and an ecosystem

of interoperable components to unify the marketplace and accelerate enterprise and industrial IoT. The EdgeX framework makes it easy to create IoT-edge solutions that have the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs. As a continued step in the company’s long history of supporting and adopting open standards and specifications in the industrial-automation and process-control markets, Opto 22 recently announced it has joined EdgeX Foundry as a founding member.

Smart Industry: What in the near future most excites you about all of this?