Sponsored Content: Advantech – the IoT enabler of choice

Sponsored Content: Advantech has grown rapidly to become a global market leader in the fields of intelligent IoT systems and embedded platforms. The company has upwards of 10,000 products in its portfolio and rising. By working with co-creation partners around the globe, Advantech is continuing to add new and unique Solution-Ready Platforms (SRPs) at a rate of introduction far exceeding what can be achieved by its competitors.

The company was the first to talk about co-creation as ‘the’ most innovative way to approach the IoT market. With its strong base in hardware platforms, Advantech has been actively promoting the co-creation model, working with SRP software partners and system integrators to build a complete industrial IoT supply chain and accelerate the realisation of related applications.

IoT applications are on the brink of wide scale adoption in a multitude of sectors. However, their success rests with platform technology suppliers, such as Advantech, which can liaise closely with industry specialists to integrate and form standardised and easily duplicated SRPs based on a combination of software and hardware products.

In actual fact, Advantech is already co-creating SRPs to help customers get a head-start on the IoT market. As part of co-creation initiatives with various national and international companies, by the time 2018 reaches its conclusion, some 30 SRPs will have already been released. Interest levels are extremely high, as evidenced at Advantech’s IoT Co-Creation Summit in Suzhou, China in early November, where an impressive 6000 participants were present.

Although Advantech continues to increase its global footprint, the company fully appreciates the importance of a local presence in Europe to transcend differences in languages and cultures. As a result, the company created a pan-European ‘IoT Select Team’ from its Embedded Division. The IoT Select Team is an enabler that serve as a facilitator of projects with potential partners, helping introduce global expertise at a local level. High levels of expertise in M2M technologies and system architecture are at the heart of the IoT Select Team.

In the UK specifically, Bobby Vale was recently appointed as Advantech’s IoT Business Development Manager and Orchestrator. Bobby is not only the lead IoT engineer for the UK market, but has responsibility for other Northern European regions such as Benelux and the Nordic countries. Prior to taking up his new role, he spent a number of years as a Key Account Manager for Advantech. Bobby is a key member of Advantech’s IoT Select Team.

Many case examples already exist where Advantech has been the key enabler in delivering high-quality yet cost-effective SRP solutions for IoT projects. For example, the company was recently pivotal in an equipment protocol conversion project to enable multi-vendor equipment interoperability and connectivity.

A protocol converter is a device employed to achieve interoperability by converting one standard or proprietary protocol used by a device, to another protocol suitable for another device. Advantech’s Equipment Protocol Conversion solution is pre-integrated with Alleantia software to enable multi-vendor equipment interoperability while improving process visibility and pushing control to the edge. Alleantia makes it easy to implement comprehensive supervision and control systems for plants, devices, machines and sensors. With its native web architecture and extensive integration capabilities, the SRP is also expandable without the requirement for additional programming.

A typical customer for this SRP would be a large factory machine operator or Industry 4.0 focused system integrator; by using this powerful protocol conversion solution, this customer would increase the value of legacy equipment and improve process viability, thus gaining insight and driving productivity. In addition, it would be possible to scale systems management with control capabilities at the edge.

Another case in point is xMight, a smart energy management specialist that operates as Tesla’s official partner for charging station installations in northern Taiwan.

Collecting data from smart meters and controlling the power on each individual charging point is an essential part of xMight’s solution. Here, the company can easily connect its smart meters and EV charging points to the cloud using Advantech’s UBC-330. The Mbed-edge gateway

offers wired interfaces such as ModBus and Ethernet and can be expanded with modules to offer a number of wireless interfaces such as LTE, LoRa or WiFito act as the proxy to Mbed Cloud. With the Modbus interface on one side and IP connectivity on the other, UBC-330 translates requests or responses from Mbed Cloud and forwards them to smart meters and charging points over the Modbus network (and vice versa).

Ultimately, Advantech is setting the pace in building partnerships that deliver end-to-end solutions which are easy for end users to deploy. To find out more, please visit us online at select.advantech.com/srp-uk/