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September 2017

EdgeX Foundry Member Spotlight: Switch Automation

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

The EdgeX Foundry community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT ecosystem. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source solutions. Today, we chatted with Deb Noller, CEO and co-founder of Switch Automation.

What does your company do and what is your role? I’m the CEO and co-founder of Switch Automation. Switch is committed to creating a more sustainable world, one broken building at a time. We recognize that buildings contribute 39% to CO emissions in the U.S. alone and have a massive impact on everything from climate change to employee health and productivity. Our end-to-end solution helps enterprises uncover hidden inefficiencies in their real estate portfolios and provides real-time insight to optimize building performance.

How would you describe your company in three sentences?  Switch Automation is a smart building platform that collects disjointed building data, aggregates it in a cloud-based global framework and synthesizes the data into actionable insights. From on-site IoT monitoring devices to energy metering and sub-systems, our configurable dashboards provide a single interface where a range of facilities management professionals can understand building performance, employ fault detection and diagnostics, and execute real-time control and command. The Switch Engineering Services team, in-house data scientists and integration experts work closely with customers to ensure smooth implementation and a best-in-class user experience.

Why is your company investing in the IoT ecosystem? When Apple introduced the iPhone, they didn’t set out to build every single app. The IoT industry is enormous and there is plenty of room for many companies to be successful. However, it’s a complex space and can be difficult to build an end-to-end, quick to deploy solution. My belief is that best in-class solution providers will partner together to solve this problem and deliver more flexible, scalable options for customers.

How has IoT impacted your company? What benefits have you seen or what do you expect to achieve? IoT is our business. In the last 5 years, we’ve implemented the Switch Platform in more than 70 million sf of real estate and helped a wide range of customers realize hundreds of thousands in operational and energy savings.

Given the forecast for 70 billion connected devices by 2025 and the building-related IoT market growth to $76 billion in 2020, we will continue updating the Platform to accommodate innovative technologies, artificial intelligence and machine learning as they become operational mainstays.

Businesses currently have to invest a lot of time and energy into developing their own edge computing solutions. What are some of the business or technical challenges you have faced when adopting edge computing technologies? How have you overcome them? We had to build our own gateways and software stack to provide the interoperability, security and connectivity between systems and devices that our customers expect. Security can present a big challenge, but fortunately we’ve partnered with Dell for our hardware solution, the Switch Gateway. The Gateway utilizes TPM, Secure Boot, and Trusted App to help tamper-proof the Switch Platform. We then built a state of the art software solution on top of the Switch Gateway to reinforce protection from external threats.

Why did your company join EdgeX? For the last five years we’ve seen what a truly cohesive IoT ecosystem can do to foster connectivity, sustainability, scalability and generate huge savings for our customers.

One of our clients, a leading financial institution with 7,000+ branches, uses the Switch Platform to monitor signage, lighting, space temperatures, occupancy, energy usage and more. Prior to implementing the Platform, their operations team endured the tedious and time-consuming practice of gathering vast amounts of data from multiple disparate sources then wrestling it into actionable insights. Each branch was an isolated silo of information and by the time the information was filtered down to meaningful findings, the window for significant savings had closed.

By leveraging the Switch Platform to connect vital systems, our customer now spots problems in real time and engages the appropriate resources to repair it before incurring costly operational and capital expenses.

We want to help more businesses achieve these kinds of results and believe that supporting collaborative industry endeavors like EdgeX is a great step.

How are you going to use the framework? We already use the framework and recommend it to our customers as the best way forward for their business.

Where do you see enterprise and industrial IoT in 20 years? In 20 years, enterprise and industrial IoT will be the norm. Cars in the 1950s didn’t have electric locks–now they do. People will have devices all over their buildings and the data will be freely shared across the organization. Automated analytics, machine learning and AI will all have a seat at the table and align with evolving customer needs.

In the IoT age, what shouldn’t be connected and why? Just because you can connect to a plethora of widgets, doesn’t mean you should. I like to ask, “Does connecting to this device deliver a worthwhile and tangible benefit to the end user?”

IoT Evolution World: Samsung Doubles Down with IIoT Initiatives and Joins EdgeX Foundry

By EdgeX Foundry, In the News

As a massive conglomerate, with hundreds of thousands of employees, Samsung is a multibillion dollar industrial technology and equipment company, and over the last several years has been making steady inroads in IoT, including with the launch of its Artik sensors, which rapidly evolved into an end-to-end platform including cloud services. Created with developers in mind, Artik sensors were introduced to a growing community of “makers” but evolved into an open data exchange platform for the IoT.

Read more at IoT Evolution World.

The Manufacturing Connection: Open Source IoT Platform EdgeX Foundry Adds Member

By EdgeX Foundry, In the News

Internet of Things platforms are all the rage these days. Seems like every company either has one or is building one. On the other hand, recent news about GE Digital’s Predix and discussions on LinkedIn have thrown a cautioning light on the efficacy of platforms.

When a technology supplier releases a platform the common thread is open connectivity to devices and closed, tightly integrated integration with the supplier’s products. Sometimes there is open connectivity with a variety of databases and analytics engines, but usually not.

Read more at The Manufacturing Connection.

Opensourceforu: Samsung joins open source-focused EdgeX Foundry to boost Industrial IoT developments

By EdgeX Foundry, In the News

Samsung has joined EdgeX Foundry, an open source project building a common framework for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing. The latest move by the South Korean company is aimed to leverage the interoperability provided by open source developments to build new Industrial IoT experiences.

“EdgeX Foundry delivers the interoperability, flexibility and scalability that businesses need to deploy Industrial IoT solutions without hesitation, and it will enable us to create lightweight edge solutions that can support real-time operations for our manufacturing infrastructures,” said Kyeongwoon Leen, senior vice president, Samsung, in a statement.

Read more at Opensourceforu.com.

IoT Institute: Samsung joins EdgeX Foundry

By EdgeX Foundry, In the News

The Seoul, South Korea-based electronics manufacturing giant, with its depth of experience in the consumer IoT space, will bring an understanding of how to better scale industrial IoT efforts, specifically when it comes to ensuring security at scale, plus bring the benefits of a massive partner ecosystem, according to Philip DesAutels, senior director of IoT at The Linux Foundation. Participating in EdgeX Foundry will support Samsung’s emerging efforts in the industrial IoT sector while expanding the market of EdgeX-compatible components and devices, according to a press release announcing the news.

Read more at IoT Institute.

EdgeX Foundry Member Spotlight: Samsung Electronics

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

Today, EdgeX Foundry announced Samsung Electronics has joined as a Platinum member to help accelerate open source development of their industrial IoT edge platform. You can view the complete news release here.

We had the chance to sit down with Kyeongwoon Lee, Senior Vice President for Samsung Electronics, to discuss why they joined the EdgeX community and how they will be using the framework.

What is your your role within Samsung?

I am one of the core contributors and enablers for Samsung’s IoT business in terms of connectivity with our variety of products. By working with the IoT ecosystem, I am very active in the open source community and leverage different standards such as Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) and IoTivity.

What is Samsung’s vision for Industrial IoT? 

Our traditional portfolio includes Consumer Electronics (CE), Information technology & Mobile Communications (IM) and Device Solutions (DS). But there is a lot of potential in Industrial IoT (IIoT), such as Smart Manufacturing, Smart Building and Smart Lighting and Smart Energy Management, and we believe we need to build a synergy and true seamless interoperable IoT services across the business domains. As one of the biggest manufacturing companies around the world, we have many infrastructures and a lot of experiences but, if we collaborate with EdgeX Foundry, we believe that our IIoT efforts will be much more clear and stronger. We will be able to continue building and growing an IIoT business.

What are some of the business or technical challenges you have faced when developing IoT edge solutions? How have you overcome them?

The biggest technical challenge is interoperability. There are a variety of devices in factories that are part of proprietary solutions and aren’t talking to each other.  Even in global standardization, there are still Brownfield areas that are used by proprietary solutions which makes interoperability a challenge. The other challenges are scalability and flexibility. For example, real-time operations is very important and in order to meet performance criteria, we need scalability.

We’ve overcome some of these challenges by working with open source such as IoTivity, and leveraging some of the IoT standards like OCF. In addition to this, when it comes to the IIoT ecosystem, we need more flexibility per vertical specific use case, so that we could expect the faster and more optimized deployment. We believe that the best answer is to collaborate on a pure open source platform that is vendor neutral and can work with existing technologies and services. This will help us deploy the very best to the industry and developers. 

Why is Samsung joining EdgeX Foundry?

We are attracted to EdgeX Foundry’s value proposition and recognize that it is the best solution for several of our challenges – interoperability, scalability, flexibility and transparency to existing cloud services. EdgeX Foundry will help us create lightweight edge solutions with the support a growing community with Industrial IoT edge platform expertise.

How are you planning to use the EdgeX framework? How do you think it will help you achieve your business goals?

EdgeX Foundry will help Samsung create interoperable and lightweight edge solutions that will help us grow and strengthen our presence in Industrial IoT.

Samsung Joins EdgeX Foundry to Accelerate Open Source Development of Industrial IoT Edge Platform

By Announcement, EdgeX Foundry

Samsung strengthens its commitment to open source to help accelerate interoperability across the Industrial IoT ecosystem

SAN FRANCISCO – September 11, 2017 – EdgeX Foundry, an open source project building a common framework for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing, today announced Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. has joined as a Platinum member. Participating in EdgeX Foundry will support Samsung’s emerging efforts in the industrial sector while expanding the market of EdgeX compatible components and devices.

“The true potential of IoT will be realized with solutions that cross both the consumer and industrial sectors. As one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world, having seamless IoT across our business domains and factories would streamline operations and drive efficiencies, but interoperability is a major challenge,” said Kyeongwoon Lee, Senior Vice President at Samsung Electronics. “EdgeX Foundry delivers the interoperability, flexibility and scalability that businesses need to deploy Industrial IoT solutions without hesitation, and it will enable us to create lightweight edge solutions that can support real-time operations for our manufacturing infrastructures.”

EdgeX Foundry is a project of The Linux Foundation that is building an open interoperability framework hosted within a full hardware- and OS-agnostic reference software platform to enable an ecosystem of plug-and-play components that unifies the marketplace and accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions. Designed to run on any hardware or operating system and with any combination of application environments, EdgeX can quickly and easily deliver interoperability between connected devices, applications and services, across a wide range of use cases.

“Samsung is an active contributor in the open source community and has been a key driver behind IoT standardization supporting consumer devices and smart home technology,” said Philip DesAutels, PhD Senior Director of IoT at The Linux Foundation. “Their manufacturing experience combined with their expertise in consumer electronics, mobile devices and enterprise solutions will be essential to the development of the EdgeX Framework, and we are excited to welcome them into the community.”

EdgeX Foundry has rapidly grown to almost 60 members since its launch in April 2017 and is supported by an active community. More than 150 people from around the world joined EdgeX Foundry face-to-face meetings over the summer to align on project goals, develop working groups and discuss next steps for the project. EdgeX Foundry has also launched a series of technical training sessions called Tech Talks that are designed to help onboard new developers on to the project. Additional information about these Tech Talks, upcoming EdgeX Foundry meetings and how to participate is available at https://wiki.edgexfoundry.org.

About EdgeX Foundry

EdgeX Foundry is an open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation building a common open framework for IoT edge computing and an ecosystem of interoperable components that unifies the marketplace and accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions. Designed to run on any hardware or operating system and with any combination of application environments, EdgeX enables developers to quickly create flexible IoT edge solutions that can easily adapt to changing business needs. To learn more, visit: www.edgexfoundry.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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