Technology cooperation to ease IIoT deployment
Hilscher North America, Inc. has formed an IIoT Solutions Marketing Cooperation with middleware-vendor Cirrus Link Solutions and SCADA-supplier Inductive Automation to support sales of high value Industrial Internet of Things solutions to industrial automation markets.
The cooperation draws on IIoT products and services already available from the three vendors. “Individually, our products are leaders in their field,” says Phil Marshall, CEO of Hilscher North America. “Collectively, we can offer a unique technology combination that opens up advanced monitoring, analysis, management and maintenance benefits. Our combined resources put the big operational gains promised by IIoT within easy reach of any enterprise.”
The three companies are contributing to the cooperation as follows:
1. Hilscher North America: Networking-solutions vendor supplying netIOT Edge Gateways for gathering data from manufacturing plants and making it available via the MQTT protocol.
2. Cirrus Link Solutions: Middleware vendor supporting MQTT software and server products to enable the distribution of data to users and return processed results to the plant.
3. Inductive Automation: SCADA vendor whose Ignition industrial-applications platform assimilates the Cirrus Link data and presents it anywhere in the enterprise.
Cirrus Link Solutions’ CTO Arlen Nipper, one of the inventors of MQTT nearly 20 years ago, says, “With IIoT, we are witnessing the merging of Operating Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT). This demands fast transmission of data from sensors up to high-level corporate platforms and back. Our MQTT middleware servers and enablement tools take the raw data from Hilscher’s Edge Gateways and publish meaningful information for Ignition to deliver to end users.”
Inductive Automation’s Chief Strategy Officer Don Pearson completes the story. “Ignition is modular and our unique licensing model offers almost unlimited scalability at an attractive price for any size of operation. Hilscher and Cirrus Link enhance our SCADA capability all the way to the edge of the enterprise. Anyone with access to Ignition can now acquire, analyze, display and process plant information from across the enterprise within minutes. With 1,500 Ignition System Integrators globally we believe we are collectively opening up many new IIoT opportunities for industry."
