HighByte Blog
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Time to read: 8 minutes  Posted by John Harrington "We're not in Kansas anymore." In fact, we’re in Chicago at IMTS, the largest North American Industrial Technology show of the year, where we’re announcing the release of HighByte Intelligence Hub version 2.5! The latest version has come a long way since its original release in early 2020. What began as a data hub for OPC to MQTT has evolved into an Intelligence Hub that truly lives up to its name. The Intelligence Hub satisfies real, complex business use cases and enables enterprise IT management of industrial data.
Manufacturers have realized that publishing 750,000 data tags (or even 75,000 data tags) straight to the cloud at a 1 second rate does not solve real business problems for the enterprise and often creates a data swamp. Instead, industrial data must be collected, transformed, aggregated, and delivered to the cloud as curated data payloads. In HighByte Intelligence Hub version 2.5, we’ve provided unparalleled support for Microsoft Azure with the addition of Azure IoT Edge connectivity, support for Azure IoT Central, and the ability to import DTDL models from Azure Digital Twins. We’ve also also added support for third-party JavaScript functions, input cache management, instance referencing, and many more features to improve the coverage of more complex use cases that customers need to solve. As industrial data has become the major source of data for the broader business to drive improvement and new lines of revenue, the systems feeding the cloud for these initiatives must fall within the enterprise IT infrastructure. With the latest release of the Intelligence Hub, we’ve added support for Active Directory and improved ability to monitor and alert when data is bad or stale and when flow performance is poor. This post provides an overview of the release, highlighting new connectivity, monitoring, management, and advanced use case capabilities. Let’s take a look. Time to read: 6 minutes  Posted by Torey Penrod-Cambra When it comes to data collection, who are you really serving?
That objective often gets lost amid the OT/IT alignment discussions. Anyone who has embarked on a digital transformation project is likely familiar with the data silos that exist between their OT and IT departments. But we don’t spend enough time talking about how to make that data usable for the line of business. Our line of business colleagues (and their systems of record) are the ultimate customer. The use of IoT-enabled devices is increasing the availability of operational data. IDC has projected there will be 41.6 million IoT devices in the field generating 79.4 zettabytes of data by 2025. These devices include machines, sensors, and cameras as well as industrial tools. To truly make that data usable, we need to merge this data with information from other systems and provide context for line of business users. In an industrial environment, these users include quality, maintenance, engineering, R&D, regulatory, and product management. Time to read: 9 minutes Posted by Torey Penrod-Cambra It’s been inspiring to see the wide variety of ways customers are using HighByte Intelligence Hub to conquer Industry 4.0 use cases that previously seemed impossible. From creating contextualized electronic batch reports to improving first run yield, predicting asset maintenance, performing real-time analytics on UNS data, and gaining enterprise-wide performance visibility across multiple sites with different systems—customers are using the Intelligence Hub in increasingly more sophisticated ways.
With more sophisticated use cases comes the need for more sophisticated tools for scalability and connectivity in the Intelligence Hub. That’s why I am so excited to introduce HighByte Intelligence Hub version 2.4. With new instance and input templates and parameters, global functions, custom conditions, OPC collection, and more, the latest release takes a giant leap forward in terms of scalability and data pipeline automation. I sat down with my friend and colleague John Harrington, Chief Product Officer at HighByte, to learn more about version 2.4 and what these new capabilities will mean for our customers. Time to read: 7 minutes  Posted by John Harrington The efforts of standards organizations like OPC Foundation, Eclipse Foundation (Sparkplug), ISA, CESMII, and MTConnect represent a significant step forward for the advancement of Industry 4.0 in manufacturing.
But industry standards only go so far. Businesses need data to tell the story of what is happening, why it is happening, and how to fix it. Multiple pieces of information must be assembled with other pieces of information from other sources to tell the use case story—just like words must be combined into sentences and sentences combined to form stories. Data standards can’t tell the use case story—they can only provide a dictionary. Standardizing the device-level data into structures is key, but only the beginning. Data standards alone will not solve your interoperability problems because they don’t provide the use case related context you need to make strategic decisions. Here are four key reasons why you still need an Industrial DataOps solution like the Intelligence Hub—even with the introduction or evolution of new standards. |
