Interview
ADLINK taking a new stance on IoT solutions
ADLINK acquired PrismTech back in December 2015. Lawrence Ross, vice president and general manager software & solutions, ADLINK Technology IoT Solutions and Technology business unit, talks to CIE editor Amy Wallington about ADLINK’s new strategies since acquiring PrismTech
P
rismTech, a former UK-based software company specialising in Data Distribution Service (DDS), was
acquired in December 2015 by ADLINK to strengthen its IoT and data distribution services across the whole company. Lawrence Ross, originally CEO of PrismTech, explains: “Since our acquisition by ADLINK, I stayed on initially to run the PrismTech business inside of ADLINK as a standalone unit and continuing to sell our DDS product called Vortex DDS. Meanwhile, in the background, we have been working on the integration of the two companies but also trying to build product synergy. In the last year and a half that has really come to fruition. “We have done some reorganisation
internally to integrate the original PrismTech organisation into ADLINK so all of the people in PrismTech have been incorporated into ADLINK’s IoT Solutions and Technology business unit (IST). That business unit incorporates an organisation that focuses specifically on smart factory and all of the software and hardware that enables smart factories. We also have some core appliance-like products and application specific products. We also have products that scrape images from a VGA
display on legacy equipment and therefore create data from equipment that cannot be connected. And that’s really part of ADLINK’s strategy. You may see us talking about ‘Connect the Unconnected’. This is really looking at how to get a myriad of data that exists in legacy equipment and digitise that data and make it capable of being consumed in some kind of IoT solution. Connectivity and extraction of data and all the different technologies that go along with that are really the primary focus of this smart factory organisation.” After explaining one side of the IST business unit, Ross goes on to talk about the side he is involved with. He says: “The other part of IST is the software and solutions organisation and that’s my unit. As the name suggests, we are specifically focused on the software aspect of the business; we build software then take the software and build it into solution stacks that we either productise and sell directly or we incorporate into our smart factory products. We also work closely with our partners and system integrators to take it to market.” DDS remains to be a key strand of the business since being acquired and is widely used in military and aerospace and, more
recently, has started to gain some traction in IoT which was what really attracted PrismTech to ADLINK. Ross comments: “We continue to support our large installed base of military and aerospace customers from our original DDS business. We are now growing that business in IoT, much like our competitors, and the use cases are very interesting.
“For DDS the technology is starting to
be prescribed into other markets. As already mentioned, military, aerospace and defence is a market where DDS has been prescribed for many years. We have always had enquiries with people asking for DDS to be implemented as the only option whereas in other segments, this is not always the case. Many people have a number of different technology solutions that they could deploy of which DDS could be one of them.”
He continues: “Other markets where DDS is becoming prescribed is in automotive with companies working on infrastructure to allow autonomous
vehicles to communicate directly. Today, vehicles do not communicate directly; they look at each other with cameras and radar and so on but there is no direct communication path. So working on this infrastructure to allow vehicles to securely communicate with each other is very important and DDS is key. In fact, AUTOSAR, a big European-driven consortium focused on building standards around this sort of thing, has actually selected DDS as one of the underlying technologies. So automotive is becoming a very interesting market for DDS.” Another area of interest for the implementation of DDS is robotics. “There is an organisation called ROS – the Robotics Operating System – which is a foundation based around how you can create autonomous robots, not using proprietary software but built on open source with commercial extensions,” describes Ross. “ROS prescribed the use of DDS as the communication and data management layer in robotics and that’s another market opportunity for the use of DDS.” With the acquisition of PrismTech, ADLINK is focusing on the IoT side of the business. Ross believes there are so many people claiming to be IoT platform vendors and this is creating an element of confusion. He says: “One man’s IoT platform is another man’s bag of ‘bits’. To build a system, you start off with some hardware and some sensors; you then need the ability to collect data from those sensors, put in some data normalisation and have the ability to manage that data on your data acquisition device. You then want to move that data somewhere which could be the cloud or multiple clouds or it could be to some analytics platform that exists at the edge using so called streaming analytics techniques and machine learning, etc. An IoT platform is a collection of all of those things. Some people approach it from the top of the stack; they have a cloud-based platform and a tablet-based platform which isn’t very interesting unless you get data on it. These companies are trying to encourage everyone to ship all their data to the cloud which can have some fundamental flaws.”
12 September 2018 Components in Electronics
www.cieonline.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
