HighByte Blog
Read company updates and our technology viewpoints here.
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Read company updates and our technology viewpoints here.
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Time to read: 11 minutes Since the third industrial revolution, manufacturers have been slowly but steadily automating their operations. From the PLC to ERP to Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), industry has adopted myriad advancements in technology to gain an edge and, sometimes, even to survive. Rapid technological advancement led to a slew of devices, applications, and services that were rarely introduced or managed under a holistic technology strategy. Time to read: 8 minutes For quite some time, people have been asking us how the Intelligence Hub relates to a Unified Namespace (UNS). Is it a specific part of a UNS architecture, a platform by which one might build a UNS, or a UNS architecture itself? Over time, our answers have developed alongside the capabilities of the Intelligence Hub. From the beginning, the Intelligence Hub could connect to third-party MQTT brokers as well as model the data going in and out of them. And recently, we added an embedded MQTT broker to the Intelligence Hub to address brokering and provide the ability for MQTT clients to connect to the Intelligence Hub directly. These provided the functionality needed for much of what might facilitate or be considered a UNS, but it was missing a critical part: a way to visualize the contents. Time to read: 6 minutes Ever since the first release of HighByte Intelligence Hub in 2020, HighByte has developed the solution to meet the industrial data integration needs of today’s industrial customers and tomorrow’s market requirements. The first version of the Intelligence Hub was a client-based application that collected and published contextualized data to any consuming system. As Industry 4.0 leaders began to integrate more systems and assets into their ecosystems, data consumers needed better data visibility and access. The consumers wanted to be able to see all available information, so they could access exactly what they needed. To deliver this visibility and access, we embedded an MQTT broker into the Intelligence Hub, giving administrators the necessary tools to build a Unified Namespace (UNS) that would allow consumers to easily subscribe to the information they desired. With changing needs in mind, in May 2023, we took the next step in the evolution of the Intelligence Hub, adding the ability to request data on-demand through the Intelligence Hub with a built-in REST Data Server. This addition allows users to request time series, transactional, or master data from systems through a single, simple API. Time to read: 9 minutes From our very first release in early 2020, HighByte Intelligence Hub has developed alongside the needs of Industry 4.0 pioneers. We have focused our efforts on addressing the most pressing challenges faced by industrial companies as they integrate systems and modernize their architectures. Today, industrial information networks encompass more sensors, devices, and systems than ever before, indicating an exciting level of connectivity being adopted globally. To facilitate and accelerate this adoption, we are excited to announce Intelligence Hub version 3.1. Intelligence Hub version 3.1 includes powerful data accessibility, governance, and scaling capabilities from a broad swath of new features, each of which extends the reach of the Intelligence Hub to even more producers and consumers of industrial data. Time to read: 7 minutes For the past several months, 55 beta testers in 13 countries have been kicking the tires on HighByte Intelligence Hub version 3.0 and generously providing their feedback. Today, I’m excited to announce this major release is now available. Version 3.0 is a step change for the Intelligence Hub and for the Industrial DataOps market. It raises the bar for what a DataOps solution can be at Enterprise scale. It introduces a powerful new Pipelines builder to curate complex data pipelines. It makes the often-vague concept of the Unified Namespace (UNS) tangible and achievable with an embedded MQTT broker—reducing additional software, cost, and administration overhead for our customers. I sat down with HighByte Chief Product Officer John Harrington to talk about some of these advancements available in Version 3.0, including Pipelines. His thoughts are below. I also provide insights from our partner Goodtech, a deep dive on the embedded broker, a review of new project management capabilities, and more. Time to read: 6 minutes I’m excited to announce that HighByte Intelligence Hub version 3.0 is now available in beta. The release is packed with powerful new capabilities, including a fully integrated MQTT broker, enhanced Central Configuration, more intuitive user experience, and many more. These capabilities will enable you to rapidly deploy the data infrastructure you need to build a Unified Namespace (UNS), scale these deployments, manage the environment, and meet your advanced Industrial DataOps use case requirements. Time to read: 8 minutes "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: 9 minutes 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. Introducing the Intelligence Hub version 2.3: Data conditioning, data pipeline monitoring & more4/5/2022
Time to read: 6 minutes Real-time performance monitoring is a crucial element of the Industry 4.0 revolution. Advanced analytics allow you to view or even predict anomalies in operational processes, such as asset performance, defects, or production bottlenecks in real time. But what about the integrity of data flows? As you become more reliant on analytics, disruptions to data collection, modeling, preparation, and delivery will reduce your operational agility, and could cause production delays, scrap, and other business challenges. You need confidence that you have reliable data when you need it. This is where HighByte Intelligence Hub version 2.3 comes in. The latest release of the Intelligence Hub enables you to condition raw data, view flow and connection status in the user interface, and easily monitor data pipelines at scale using the Intelligence Hub or your preferred third-party system-monitoring applications, like Splunk and Datadog. The release is packed with enhancements that make developing and troubleshooting data pipelines easier than ever. Time to read: 3 minutes We live in a time where attacks on critical infrastructure and the underlying software and hardware that comprise these systems is all too common and will only increase year over year. Rest assured that HighByte is committed to putting security first in its design and implementation of its software solutions. Our industry recognizes that a defense-in-depth strategy must be employed when building out a technology stack from various components. This not only applies to an end-user’s use of applications and equipment from various vendors, but even more so by vendors who develop solutions that pull in third-party technology or tap into interfaces and standards that allow for seamless integration with foreign sources of data and information. Time to read: 7 minutes When I first joined the HighByte team, I knew two things. First, modeling industrial data is immensely powerful. After spending a decade interacting with tags and seeing firsthand how building context from tags in the Cloud is painful, I knew that modeling data at the Edge would be a game changer. The second thing I knew is that we were going to build a lot of connectors. This is par for the course in the industrial world where a mix of legacy and new equipment is the norm. We started with the most common and generalized standards, like OPC UA, HTTP, MQTT, and SQL to cast a wide net for connectivity options inside the factory. But it was clear that as we progressed, the market would demand explicit connectors for common systems. That is why I am excited to announce new connectors in version 2.2 for OSIsoft PI System (now part of the AVEVA portfolio), InfluxDB, and Oracle Database. All three connectors support both reading and writing data, and interacting with these systems in advanced ways, without needing to read a manual. Time to read: 7 minutes I love the chaos of an early market like DataOps for Manufacturing. It’s clear that things are changing, but what technologies and approaches will win out is less obvious. In these types of markets, as a solution provider, it’s equally fun to watch them mature. One sign of a maturing market is the type of questions early customers ask about a solution. At first, the questions are different variations of “Does it work?” or “How is it different than a, b, or c?” as customers try and understand the solution and how it solves their problem. As the market matures, the questions shift focus to technical requirements like “What’s the performance with 10,000x?” or “Does it support high availability?” Here at HighByte we’re seeing more scale and reliability questions in early engagements, a sign that both the market and the product are maturing. That’s why I’m excited to announce some key features in version 2.1 that make HighByte Intelligence Hub more scalable and reliable to fit the needs of your production environment. Time to read: 5 minutes Since releasing HighByte Intelligence Hub version 1.0 in January 2020, our customers have been successfully deploying solutions to simplify the integration of existing operational technology (OT) and new Industry 4.0 solutions that deliver rich information to IT, data scientists, and other stakeholders. Throughout the past year, we have focused on building out a connectivity library that enables users to connect to AWS IoT SiteWise, Azure IoT Hub and Event Hubs, REST, SQL, MQTT / Sparkplug, OPC UA, and CSV files, providing the market with the interoperability needed for Digital Transformation. In addition to connectivity, HighByte Intelligence Hub introduced a no-code approach to modeling assets, systems, processes, or systems of systems that are centrally managed and automatically transformed into a usable format for any one of our connectors. This has enabled customers to scale their plant to cloud initiatives in days and weeks, rather than months and years. Time to read: 6 minutes Our latest release is packed with new features and capabilities that make common Industry 4.0 use cases not just easy, but fun! Do you need to get SQL data into your Unified Namespace (UNS)? How about data from your test equipment that’s sitting around in CSV files? Maybe you’re moving away from SQL and experimenting with NoSQL alternatives because your data models are in a state of change? Even better, maybe you have your Edge-to-Cloud strategy figured out, and now you’re looking at “Cloud-to-Edge”, trying to get alerts generated by machine learning back to the factory floor. These are just a handful of use cases we hear from customers and new use cases we’ve enabled in HighByte Intelligence Hub version 1.4. Time to read: 7 minutes Industry 4.0 solutions start with the same problem. How do I collect critical data from the factory floor? This sounds easy, but in reality, factory floors are highly heterogenous environments. It's common to have a newer machine that is highly connected sitting next to a 30-year-old machine with no connectivity at all. This forces teams to get creative. They might use an OPC UA server for one machine, SQL for the next, and retrofit another with new sensors that publish data via REST or MQTT. Each situation is unique, and teams need flexible solutions to leverage the connectivity options they have in place today. That’s why I am excited to announce the release of HighByte Intelligence Hub version 1.3. This release is full of new capabilities that allow our customers to gather data from many sources in the factory, rapidly add context to the data, and reliably deliver it to their platforms of choice. These additional capabilities greatly expand the connectivity options available to our customers. Here are the highlights: Time to read: 4 minutes The future of Industry 4.0 is open: open standards, open platforms, and open thinking. In today’s ecosystem, realizing the full potential of Industry 4.0 requires a mesh of products working together to fulfill each layer of the technology stack. Open standards and platforms simplify these integrations and speed up the time-to-value for Industry 4.0 solutions. That is why I am excited to announce the release of HighByte Intelligence Hub version 1.2, enabling our customers to deploy their Industry 4.0 solutions even faster by leveraging additional open standards and platforms.
Time to read: 5 minutes
Leveraging industrial information to make better decisions, faster is the ultimate goal of Industry 4.0, Smart Manufacturing, IIoT, and Advanced Analytics solutions. However, as industrial information networks expand to encompass more sensors, devices, and systems, the existing data infrastructure has become overloaded. Manufacturers and other industrial companies require an Industrial DataOps solution that can handle industrial data collection, transformation, and delivery at scale. Scalability is the name of the game.
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