Report highlights top vendors delivering at the edge

The industrial edge continues to be a hot topic for industrial and manufacturing firms when it comes to understanding the performance of their equipment and production line overall. In its latest report, global technology intelligence firm ABI Research highlights the top vendors working with customers to deliver insights on-premises for data utilisation.

“The industrial edge will help to avoid unplanned downtime and [prolong] asset life by collecting data from sensors close to a piece of equipment (edge connectivity), processing and analysing the information locally (edge computing/intelligence) and managing the deployment of IoT devices, data collection, analysis and transfer (edge orchestration),” said Michael Larner, Principal Analyst, Industrial & Manufacturing at ABI Research.

Suppliers in this space either focus on delivering one aspect of the industrial edge — such as ADLINK for edge connectivity, the computing and intelligence (Altizon, Cognex, Emerson, FogHorn, IOTech or Telit) or look to orchestrate the entire process (AVEVA, Siemens).

“For time-sensitive use cases such as condition-based monitoring, organisations want the low latency provided by an industrial edge architecture. They also want to save on the transfer and data storage costs when using cloud infrastructure,” Larner said.

Companies looking to deliver an industrial edge architecture vary from industrial automation providers (AVEVA, Emerson), companies already monitoring the production line (Cognex) and analytics specialists such as Litmus and FogHorn.

“Industrial edge shouldn’t be considered in isolation, rather the tip of the sword for collecting sensitive equipment information that forms part of a production line’s digital twin,” Larner added. “To maximise investments, buyers need to understand the protocols that suppliers’ solutions utilise to ensure smooth data transfer, the industrial applications to which the data can be transferred and the partnerships a vendor has to foster innovation.”

These findings are from ABI Research’s Hot Tech Innovators: Industrial Edge report.

Image: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Gorodenkoff