Interview Ross continues: “Other people are
approaching it from the other end of the spectrum which is the device end. For example, they look at sensors and how to take data from those sensors and do something with it. People at the bottom of the stack are trying to move up and people at the top of the stack are trying to move down. ADLINK sit in the middle in that we have historically been a hardware player shipping a lot of embedded systems. But two years ago we actually changed our strapline from being about embedded computing to being about edge computing. Our strapline now says ‘Leading Edge Computing’. For us it’s all about edge and the ability to take data from sensors and devices at the edge, whether that’s existing infrastructure or new infrastructure, normalise that data and then give customers the ability to either push that data to one or more cloud platforms. Our platforms are heterogeneous; we work with all the major cloud platform providers to push data to those platforms to allow customers to do their analytics and connect to different IP environments. We have a number of connectors that we built to allow you to do that.” ADLINK has a flexible approach to allow customers to pick the platform they want to use. Ross explains: “Whether the customer wants to use Google, Amazon, Azure, they’re all fine with us and it’s fine to switch between platforms too. We are not locking you in to a particular cloud provider. We allow you to do what’s called multi-phase analytics so you can do some at the edge because it makes sense for a variety of business and practical reasons –
data is not really new, it’s putting it all together and making it easy to use that is maybe the challenge. But actually getting people started in a way that they can achieve a fast return on investment is one of the most fundamental challenges. “We know that a lot of organisations
are under pressure to come up with an IoT strategy. The approach we take is to basically forget about the technology and instead help to prove or disprove your IoT hypothesis. We help you to design a business case which will allow you to move forward and monetise IoT and then you scale up over time to add more assets and more applications and increase the value of your investment.” This approach to IoT from ADLINK tries
who wants to stream terabytes of data to the cloud just to create a simple dashboard. It’s very expensive to do that, there’s the issues of latency, cost, and maybe security. We believe there is absolutely a place for edge analytics and this multi-phase approach or distributed analytics approach is the right way to do it. That creates very flexible systems.” IoT is something everyone is trying to get involved with but Ross thinks people need to give more thought to their projects and create a hypothesis to prove it will work. He comments: “Everyone is talking about IoT but as a vendor, I think it’s fair to say that not everybody is putting their money where their mouth is and that
is creating a lot of challenges. We often quote this when talking to customers but a recent survey said that 70 per cent of IoT projects fail and what that means is that the whole vendor community and potentially the customer community is sort of in POC (proof of concept) hell. Everyone wants to try it but of course, if you don’t really know what you’re trying to achieve then it’s likely that you will fail. And that’s not because the technology doesn’t work; actually the technology has probably all existed before, what’s really changing is more around machine learning and the analytics but the technology of getting data from devices and moving it around and managing that
to address the problem of how to get started. The service is called Digital eXperiments as-a-Service (DXS) and helps to prove the hypothesis. Ross concludes: “I’m very passionate about what we do. I love that we are actually able to solve some of the real world problems; sometimes when you get stuck in software and technology it’s not really very interesting in terms of the kinds of problems you’re solving but I think IoT is really starting to allow us to solve real world problems that really matter to people. I think to me that’s one of the most exciting aspects to IoT and if we can get out of POC hell and really start to deploy systems that start to make a difference I think the industry and consumers will start to benefit from those advances and the sky is the limit.”
www.adlinktech.com
www.cieonline.co.uk
Components in Electronics
September 2018 13
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