Earlier this month, ZEDEDA joined the Linux Foundation at IoT World in Santa Clara, California. IoT World is a jam-packed event with close to 13,000 attendees and nearly 200 exhibitors, covering a wide range of industries empowered by IoT, including connected automobiles, industrial automation, smart cities, and more.
ZEDEDA attended the event as part of LF Edge, an umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation established to develop an open framework for edge computing. The LF Edge booth at IoT World provided a great showcase of the projects within the organization, with demonstrations of new Akraino blueprints, a smart build automation from EdgeX Foundry, an industrial assembly line simulation supporting MQTT and Monbus protocols, and an end-to-end showcase of predictive analytics collection and visualization leveraging Project EVE.
The Project EVE demonstration provided a look at how edge virtualization technology is able to simplify complicated IoT projects, making it possible to collect and analyze sensor data at scale across distributed environments. The demonstration leveraged a model wind turbine with sensors gathering data such as speed, temperature, and humidity, which in the real world provide critical information on the health of individual wind turbines that operate hundreds of feet in the air. The model wind turbine was connected to a gateway device running EVE, which virtualized the hardware, network, and application layers on the device. This created a secure, zero-trust environment, a central control plane, and enabled application management and orchestration. A virtual instance of Foglamp, an application capable of aggregating sensor data, was deployed on top of EVE and configured to route the sensor data to a local Pi server, allowing for real-time visualization of the data.
The demonstration highlighted the role EVE can play for wind farm organizations: making it possible to gather maintenance information on turbines while handling all of the regular administrative tasks remotely. Instead of sending a technician to update a gateway installed at the top of a turbine, the customer can leverage EVE’s open APIs to conduct all tasks from a central controller, such as the one ZEDEDA provides. When implemented at edge scale — such as a wind farm with several thousand turbines — this single pane of glass enables organizations to not only have visibility into the general state of their devices, but also to automate operations like software deployment and updates, and to be notified of potential anomalies.
Why did EVE matter to IoT World attendees?
Gartner predicts that by 2021, 50% of organizations will have implemented IoT projects, up from 12% in 2018.
Organizations understand the many benefits that IoT implementations can bring to their businesses, such as reduced costs, better customer experience, and increased revenue. However, many businesses struggle to understand how to implement these projects, which often rely on both existing legacy and modern cloud applications, and to do so in a way that is scalable. When it comes to IoT, the scale is unprecedented, with estimates that there will be more than 25 billion devices connected by 2021. EVE makes it easier for organizations to scale their projects by providing a framework that can be applied to any hardware, network, or application, in addition to central visibility, control, and protection across the most distributed of ecosystems.
The role of open source IoT projects like EVE also resonated with IoT World attendees from diverse industries. Whether it’s powering a clean energy project like the event demo, automating manufacturing operations, or improving supply chain operations, EVE enables organizations to build an open, agnostic IoT infrastructure. And with the sheer variety of conversations on the IoT World tradeshow floor, one thing is clear: the potential impact of IoT is reaching into every industry.
Author Sarah Beaudoin at IoT World 2019
