IoT

Internet of Things

How the Internet of Things is Reinventing the Energy Industry in 2022

How the Internet of Things is Reinventing the Energy Industry in 2022 650 486 Exist Software Labs

The Internet of Things (IoT) has given so much convenience to human activities and transactions over the years that it has become one of the most important technologies on a global scale. It helped not just individuals on its day-to-day activities; but also various business verticals on its company-wide operations.

The energy industry in the Philippines is no exception. The Internet of Things (IoT) provides a wide range of applications that can be utilized in the energy sector; this includes energy production, transmission, distribution, consumption, and many more.

See figure 1.1 (This is the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) over the years.)Power System Solutions

In previous years, most of us, consumers, never really considered mother earth when consuming energy; This is one of the improvements that IoT may bring forth! Organizations can drastically cut waste thanks to increased control over energy consumption. It brings significant cost savings and allows for a reduction in CO2 emissions, which benefits the environment.

Another challenge that the Energy Sector has is the lack of integrated energy planning and demand forecasting. This significantly widens the gap between energy supply and demand; However, with the help of IoT’s advanced analytical systems, organizations can now develop precise and real-time forecasts. Here are some Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities that will reinvent the Philippine energy industry.

See figure 1.2 (Here is the entire IoT ecosystem of the Energy Sector. From generators, transmission, distributors to the consumers.)

Power System Solutions1. Intelligent Grid

IoT enables grid systems to gain control over power flow or significantly curb energy use and helps in tracking real-time energy consumption that gives users almost complete control over their energy consumption. Its automated approach also helps consumers become more cost-efficient while decreasing energy waste.

While Energy companies, on the other hand, may achieve real-time monitoring, rapid data restoration, and highly accurate usage forecasts, making energy system management and maintenance much easier.

Empower your system with IoT today!

2. Monitoring of Processes and Resource Optimization

Automation is one of the benefits that IoT can provide; having an IoT system means less human intervention, and less human intervention means fewer errors. The use of sensor devices in a power plant allows for the automated execution of processes and the delivery of better, error-free production. The availability of data on all areas of the supply chain enables the operating system to make accurate judgments on a wide range of factors.

IoT solutions generate real-time data, allowing management to act quickly and take appropriate action if there are errors or inconsistencies, allowing businesses to produce higher-quality services.

3. Analytical Advances

With increased energy consumption demand, energy businesses must rely on advanced analytics more than ever to meet customers’ expectations for more options, better transparency, and lower energy prices and waste. In order to compete, utilities and power generators must utilize the same analytics to precisely anticipate future power usage.
The sensor-enabled technology assists the Philippines’ energy sector in gathering more precise data that can be used in proper forecasting of energy supply and demand. As a way, it lowers unnecessary energy usage.

4. Reduction of maintenance and operating costs

Predictive maintenance is another significant advantage of IoT data. Proactive testing and repair significantly reduce the amount of time the machines are inactive, hence minimizing catastrophic equipment failures and lowering maintenance expenses. It enables managers to take complete control of energy data from the beginning and considerably optimize the operation. The use of an IoT-powered solution in the energy sector employs sensor-based approaches to automate the industry’s operation.

Intelligent sensors and devices, for example, can communicate information from distant equipment to detect an impending fault, minimizing damages and stoppages and giving the system much more flexibility.

5. Increase the Production of Renewable Energy

A smart, dependable, and efficient power supply contributes to the smooth operation of smart cities. The application of IoT in renewable energy generation will assist them in producing enough energy to meet their needs.

Sensors attached to generation, transmission, and distribution equipment are used in IoT applications in renewable energy production. These technologies let businesses remotely monitor and control the operation of their equipment in real-time; This reduces operational expenses and energy waste, but more importantly, it helps us minimize our reliance on fossil fuels.

Exist Software Labs will continue to assist businesses in the energy sector

You may now achieve the above-mentioned processes and technologies with Exist Software labs! For over 20 years, we helped several energy enterprises by implementing multiple Energy Automation solutions.

Achieve advanced analytics without breaking the bank, optimize your operations, and achieve advanced management systems by utilizing various enterprise-grade technologies designed exclusively for the energy industry.

Empower your system today!

Learn how to fully automate your processes to create a more competitive, transparent, and efficient system with our Power System Solutions.
Take your power system to the next level!

Energy Tech Trends, Java, Java Philippines

Energy Tech Trends to watch

Energy Tech Trends to watch 800 507 Exist Software Labs

With the rising energy demand, the Department of Energy will continue its advocacy to produce renewable energy to cut market prices and achieve sustainability. On the other hand, the private sector will continue to develop technology systems to achieve efficiency, and high effectiveness and keep up with the continuously evolving energy sector.

While numerous technology solutions can assist these firms in achieving their digital objectives, only a few are expected to have a significant influence in the next few years. These are the Energy Tech Trends to watch!

1. Powering the Digital Economy Through IoT (Internet of Things)

IoT, or the Internet of Things, has played a vital role in advancing digitization in several industries, including IT, energy, agriculture, healthcare, and many more.

It is one of the most advanced technologies and one of its advantages is that it improves the efficiency of several businesses, including energy. And as for the energy sector, one of the most important functions of IoT is energy conservation. 

The Internet of Things enables electricity firms to read data in real time. It enables them to quickly gather, calculate, and analyze data to improve decision-making. It also helps the energy industry transform into an integrated system, resulting in a smart solution that is equipped with advanced technology to increase industry value and maintain asset efficiency for the benefit of the economy.

2. Fifth-generation technology will establish the connection

Many companies will continue to improve their systems in the next years. The sector will continue to advance the electric grid to make it more reliable and less expensive, thanks to the national government’s directive to push for renewable energy and the industry’s developing market demands.  

These companies rely on Millions of connected devices and digital systems, such as smart meters, sensors, and management systems, to communicate data from many locations. And with their objective to digitize their system, they need to have fast and dependable technology, thus creating a need to access 5G technology. 

5G technology is the next generation of cellular technology after 4G. It has faster speed, lower latency, and the capacity to connect more devices at the same time.

Fifth-generation wireless technology will provide new features and more efficient smart grids. New 5G mobile networks will assist the integration of unconnected devices into new smart grids; it will also help the development of new electricity load forecasting software for accurate energy monitoring and forecasting. Organizations will now be able to receive and process the massive volume of data at quicker speeds with no chance of downtime.

3. Companies in the energy industry will continue to migrate to the cloud

The cloud holds the potential for endless growth, system efficiencies, and digital integration in any business industry.

With the Power industry’s continued growth, it needs a system that can handle its complex process and massive data efficiently, effectively, and precisely; this is where the cloud can help.

The cloud has the potential to change every aspect of the energy value chain. Connectivity, scalability, analytics, and automation can all help you save money and increase profits in countless ways.

Thanks to Exist’s strong foundation in the power industry, with its business solutions to industry market leaders and cloud services to other business verticals, we can now quickly apply tailored advancements to your company.

4. Artificial Intelligence will revolutionize the game.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming relevant in the energy industry and has great potential for future energy system structures.

Digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) will make energy sector systems more intelligent, efficient, dependable, and sustainable, which benefits the entire energy sector chain, from generation to transmission to distribution to the consumer.

In terms of alignment with the government’s ambitions, AI would also benefit Renewable Energy. With the growing use of renewable energy sources, it is becoming increasingly difficult to regulate the megawatts that are fed into the grid; with this, power networks will be unstable and prone to blackouts.

With this technology, renewable energy sources may now provide real-time, accurate data that allows AI to predict capacity levels.

5. The Energy Sector will embrace the power of Machine Learning

With Machine Learning (ML), it’s as if you have a sophisticated human mind monitoring your system, complete with advanced self-learning algorithms, taking your data to a whole new level by making human-like decisions based on current AI data.

ML employs approaches that can be applied to predictive maintenance. Power lines, machines, and stations, in essence, are outfitted with sensors that capture operating time series data.

With enough data, your system can now forecast if a failure will occur in your system, allowing you to more efficiently monitor maintenance, reduce downtime, and avert system failure as soon as possible; thus, lowering your system expenditures.

6. Taking Advantage of Big Data

It’s one thing to get your data, but it’s quite another to use it to your advantage. 

Big Data Analytics has the potential to be a key driver in achieving optimal company performance in the energy sector.

Big data can help the energy business in many ways, including improved supply chain management, enhanced customer satisfaction, optimizing business efficiency, analyzing future risks and possibilities, and much more.

As a result, more and more energy companies are becoming more competitive. A superior business strategy that incorporates a large amount of data and efficient processes assists them in developing company value and increasing customer satisfaction.

So, how can you achieve an advanced system and follow Energy Tech Trends?

Whether you like it or not, the energy sector will continue to advance its technological innovation.

In this regard, it is important to look for an innovative partner who can add value to your organization, and this is where Exist Software Labs can assist you! With our extensive experience in the energy industry, we could bring you the innovation you deserve.

Empower your system today!

Learn how to fully automate your processes to create a more competitive, transparent, and efficient system.
Take your power system to the next level!

IoT and Data Integration. Java Philippines. Java.

Unlocking the Power of IoT and Data Integration to Boost Transformation in the Energy Industry Webinar Highlights (2020)

Unlocking the Power of IoT and Data Integration to Boost Transformation in the Energy Industry Webinar Highlights (2020) 768 487 Exist Software Labs

Speaker: Mr. Chris Silerio | VP for Operations

Exist is a software development company that has been in the industry for almost 20 years. Five years ago, we started collaborating and developing systems with companies in the power sector, specifically, generators, distributors, electric cooperatives, and others. We are also one of the technology partners of PEMC and IEMOP. For almost five years, we’ve developed IEMOP’s Central Registration and Settlement System (CRSS) as well as their Trading Operations Central Management Systems. We’ve also recently developed PEMC’s Philippine Renewable Energy Market System (PREMS) through the contract of UNDP and DOE.

We are not an IoT solutions company, but whatever we’re discussing here is based on our vast experience in developing various enterprise system projects in different verticals. That was also made possible by the thorough RnDs and TOCs conducted by our technical team. We are also currently collaborating and partnering with hardware and other software companies that offer IoT devices and solutions.

Agenda:

    1. What is an IoT platform
    2. Discuss the necessary components or services IoT
    3. What are the various ways of implementing an IoT platform
    4. How it could coexist and integrate into a data integration (Data Warehouse/Big Data) platform
    5. How to jump-start your IoT integration journey

What is IoT?

It is the internet connectivity of small devices such as sensors, actuators, smart appliances so they could share and gather information to and from each other.

Some of you might be asking, what’s the big fuss? We already have the internet, and most of you in the power sector already implemented SCADA and PLC before. So how is it any different?

IoT addresses a lot of shortcomings of SCADA and PLC. That is a new level of connectivity between devices. The main difference is when any components within the environment are interconnected, it can act on its own without any human intervention. With all the information it has, it provides rich insight into its entire surrounding environment and instantaneously reacts efficiently by making automatic changes and actions. It can also improve performance and even predict failures, just like Tesla cars or autonomous machines that are in manufacturing plants.

To fully appreciate all the benefits of the internet of things in the energy sector, all of its major components, such as generators, grids, distributors, and consumers, should go smart soon as smart grids cannot function without ‘smart’ consumers.

What is an IoT Platform?

An IoT platform is an integrated service that connects devices and generates its ecosystem online. In the simplest terms, an IoT platform is a group of systems and services where you could operate your entire IoT landscape.

IoT Platform Types, Services, and Offerings

End-to-end IoT Platform

Some companies offer end-to-end solutions. They sell everything – hardware, actual sensors, services, software, and connectivity, plus the device management tools. It is a one-stop-shop, but this tends to be a lot more expensive. You could end up buying features or components that might not apply to your current needs, and yet, you are paying for the entire cost. One of the downsides is that it could become a case of classic single vendor lock-in that most companies steer away from.

Connectivity Management Platform

It is an inherent part of the IoT technology stack. It is the one responsible for connecting and converting data to and from devices and IoT core platforms, regardless if it is on-premise or on-cloud. The primary use case for this type of platform is when you partner with a mobile network to handle communications for security purposes. It means that the data would have to travel through a cellular network rather than flow directly to the internet. But of course, it also introduces new challenges and complexities. So you need to establish your business requirements first.

IoT Edge Platform

We see here the edge devices and the communication gateway. In this type of platform, they provide actual devices and software or tools to manage and configure the devices remotely. With this type, you don’t necessarily need to connect to the cloud as these edge devices are, in a way, functioning already as mini computing and storage machines.

IoT Cloud Platform

It is the most common computing strategy. In this setup, all information from IoT devices could be uploaded to the cloud and a centralized repository. It then runs insights with the aid of full-blown machine learning and artificial intelligence tools. Such simplifies the management of device configurations, managing, and monitoring. Whatever you deploy into the cloud, you could also have on-premise. Your cloud could also push data to the on-premise platform or vice versa.

Edge Computing

An essential part when deciding what type of platform you will choose is whether you would go with edge computing, cloud computing, or hybrid.

Edge computing is bringing the processing at the edge of the local network, not the office LAN, but the network within the autonomous component, for example, a smart car and smart parking garage. These edge devices could send and receive from various IoT devices and communicate directly with other edge devices. 

A case in point is the autonomous Tesla cars that can park itself in an IoT enabled parking garage. The cars going in and out of the garage did not wait for details from the cloud. Instead, they talk to each other directly. Such solved a crucial problem associated with the centralization of data in the cloud. In this model, all processing is distributed, and decision making is down locally by bringing cloud computing capabilities and localizing the data to these devices. It can reduce latency, process data faster, and provide instantaneous insights, as compared to sending everything first to the cloud for analysis.

How Can It Do That?

All the IoT cloud components have been, in a way, miniaturized, streamlined, and deployed in those small edge devices.

Common Components of Edge Devices

Complex Event Processing (CEP) could take data from different IoT devices and act accordingly based on the established patterns. But more often than not, actual CEP models are done on an edge core network. Then, it’s just pushed to the edge devices.

Edge computing devices now support Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence (ML & AI) locally, but there is always the option of sending the data to the enterprise data warehouse for furth ML & AI processing.

It has the ability to deploy containerized applications as well, either the software package from your solution provider or your own developed applications.

These devices are capable of storage and data management too. These devices now have storage large enough to store all data from different devices, especially in the event of network failure. It is capable of holding data temporarily until the connection gets restored.

When do we consider EDGE over CLOUD?

When your requirements are mission-critical, like, when a machine needs to stop outright to prevent an accident or defective product, sending your data first to the cloud for analysis is not an optimal solution.

Another scenario is when these components are remote, and there is limited or no connectivity to your centralized data center.

Edge computing is still developing, so it has a lot of downsides. Given that the data is localized, security measures might not be as tight as the one securing the cloud security-based systems. It is still a potential privacy and security concern in the edge devices given that the data is stored and already consolidated. That information could also contain sensitive data. Curious people can easily access the device, have the data leaked, or used maliciously.

High availability and failover. Usually, these devices are geographically dispersed. If one edge device goes down, even if you have installed clustered edge devices in one autonomous component, it is still hard to monitor and replace if you have a lot in your IoT plinth.

Scalability. As the number of IoT devices grows, it will be hard to maintain and monitor. Even if you did conduct positive planning, it could only handle so much.

So, choosing between edge and cloud computing depends on your business requirements as well as your business objectives.

Data Integration Platform

The data integration platform is another significant type of platform. Whenever you see an IoT platform presentation, there is always a storage component. It is a combination of several frameworks and tools that will handle the following 

    • Streaming of extracted data from various sources 
    • Routing of data either to your data warehouse or directly to the data consumers’ application
    • Ingestion of data to your data warehouse and OLTP, 
    • Doing a fast filling of data from the database. 

All of these are components of a full-blown enterprise data warehouse or Big Data. What we would like to note is that when you are planning to start your IoT platform, you should first have a data warehouse or Big Data strategy in place.

The goal is to align your IoT storage roadmap with your data warehouse or Big Data roadmap, and not the other way around. Remember that a data warehouse or Big Data setup is also a costly investment and should be treated as a separate project. Having an aligned IoT and data integration strategy could save you a lot of money by maximizing the use of your entire infrastructure.

There are a lot of components that IoT and data warehouse share – streaming, ingestion, and routing. All of these can have its cluster but can be utilized by both your IoT and data platform. With this setup, you can save cost in your infrastructure and reduce the skillset that you need from your IT team.

IoT and Big Data share the same challenges – volume/size of the data coming in, velocity/speed, variety, and veracity/accuracy. When deciding on your IoT storage platform, you have to make sure that it could address all of these challenges.

Here are the few options that you could opt to adopt for your IoT and data warehouse platform.

So, when you have to decide as to which computing strategy or data platform to employ, you need to consider a lot of factors. Don’t just jump on the bandwagon.

Speaker: Mr. Steven Siahetiong | Exist Technical Architect

IoT Components

  1.     Things pertain to sensors, actuators, or any device capable of sending data to the cloud.
  2.     For these devices to send data, it will need to use networking and messaging protocols for the data to be transferred to its destination. Most use wireless access for network connectivity. During the past few years, there have been substantial developments in wireless connectivity protocols. Some of the examples are Bluetooth, Low Power WAN, ZigBee, 6LoWpan, and Thread.
    • Bluetooth is a global 2.4 GHz personal area network for short-range communication. 
    • LPWAN is a type of wireless telecommunication wide area network designed to allow long-range communications at a low bit rate. There are several competing standards and vendors in the LPWAN space. The most prominent of which include Laura and SigFox.
    • ZigBee is a 2.4 GHz mesh local area network lan protocol. It was originally designed for building automation and control, so things like wireless thermostats and lighting systems often use ZigBee.
    • 6LoWpan uses a lightweight IP based communication to travel over lower data rate networks. It is an open IoT network protocol like ZigBee and is primarily used for home and building automation.
    • Thread is an open standard built on IPV6 and 6LoWpan protocols. You could think of it as Google’s version of ZigBee.

For the messaging layer, the most popular are HTTP, MQTT, and CoAP.

    • The CoAp protocol is a client server-based protocol that allows pockets to be shared between client nodes, which are commanded by the CoAP server.
    • The MQTT protocol is communication-based, which is based on the publish/subscribe methodology in which clients receive information through a broker only to the subscribed topic.
  1.     The IoT solution needs to have a platform. An IoT platform combines several IoT functions in one. It can collect and receive your data, convert data between protocols, and store and analyze data. They are available as cloud-based and standalone platforms and are available for many companies, both large and small.

The cloud will have an important role to play in IoT as it will enable companies to create networks, store data, and automate processes without having to build the infrastructure themselves. Such will let IoT services to be developed much quicker and at a lower cost than using traditional in-house systems and services.

As seen on the graph, HTTP involves the largest bandwidth and latency than any other protocols, while CoAP has the least bandwidth and latency.

MQTT offers the highest level of quality of services, with the least interoperability among the four. On the other hand, HTTP was designed for the greatest interoperability on the web and did not include reliability as a core feature.

There are many IoT platforms in the market, and the functionality of these platforms varies enormously. Although all IoT platforms will have dashboards to display data, some platforms are essentially dashboards and are only capable of displaying data from devices. You will often find the terms dashboard and platform used interchangeably.

An IoT dashboard can be considered as a basic IoT platform. A dashboard can usually display data and control devices. However, an IoT platform can usually collect data from various sources, store data, control devices, display data, run tests, deploy device updates, and manage device inventory.

Concepts

Events, insights, and actions are functional concepts that exist across the devices, platforms, and applications of an IoT solution. To further explain, consider an application that monitors the cooling system, temperature for food storage, and calls emergency maintenance services if the temperature becomes dangerously low or high.

The following processes occur in this example:

    • The devices send temperature samples from the primary cooling system to the IoT gateway via the device to cloud events every 30 seconds.
    • These events can generate insights. The IoT platform can evaluate events for any immediate contextual insights, such as temperatures at malfunctioning levels.
    • The generated insights can trigger actions. If the temperature is at a malfunctioning level, the platform can send a command to the backup system to start while the maintenance is en route to the location.

Events represent the device-to-cloud communication in an IoT solution, and maybe notifications, acknowledgments, or telemetry data.

Insights are interpretations of events. It may derive from events directly as contextual insights or transform or stored event data by application event processing for real-time or aggregated insights.

Actions are activities undertaken either programmatically or manually as a device, service, or analog actions.

IoT Customer Scenarios

How can you design an IoT solution to satisfy customer requirements?

    • Manufacturing safety systems must respond to operational data with ultra-low latency and control.
    • Mission-critical systems such as remote mining equipment, connected vessels, or offshore drilling need to analyze and react to data even with limited connectivity to the cloud.
    • The volume of data produced by jet engines or connected cars can be so large that data must be filtered or pre-processed before sending it to the cloud.
    • Regulatory compliance may require some data to be locally anonymized or aggregated before being sent to the cloud.

IoT Edge

IoT devices can connect to the IoT platform directly or through IoT Edge gateways that implement intelligent capabilities. With an IoT edge, you can analyze censored data in near real-time and issue commands when you detect anomalies to stop a machine or trigger alerts. Your streaming logic runs independently off the network connectivity, and you can choose what to send to the cloud for processing or storage. You can also filter or aggregate the data that needs to be sent to the cloud.

The benefits of using edge gateway, particularly in an IoT application, is that moving data processing functions from the cloud to the edge helps ensure accuracy and reliability. Transmitting data to and from the cloud takes time. Even milliseconds are too long for many mission-critical decisions and processes that occur in industrial operations. In the time it takes to send data to and get a response to the cloud, the data could simply become obsolete, resulting in missed opportunities for action, damaged components/products, or risks to the safety of the equipment/personnel.

Edge devices can also send data or commands directly to other devices for immediate action. Edge computing via edge gateway also makes it possible to keep sensitive data on-site to ensure its security. Some devices or systems generate so much data that the bandwidth and resources needed for the cloud to handle this data are too costly. The edge gateway can determine which data can be sent to the cloud and transmit it in the most efficient and usable form.

Industrial Edge LORA 1 Gateway

    • Extremely flexible and powerful
    • Allows to run Lola 1 application and network server locally to setup on-premise private network
    • Aimed to help the transition from legacy to connected automation with its ability of interfacing existing devices.

Types of Edge Gateways

IoT Edge devices can act as communication enablers, local device control systems, and data processors for the IoT cloud platform. IoT Edge devices can run cloud workflows on-premises and can communicate with devices even in offline scenarios.

Cloud gateways can do protocol and identity translation to and from the IoT cloud platform and can execute additional logic on behalf of devices.

In a transparent gateway pattern, the gateway simply passes communications between the devices and the IoT cloud platform.

A protocol translation gateway is also known as an opaque gateway, in contrast with the transparent gateway pattern. In this pattern, devices that do not support MQTT, AMQP, or HTTP can use a gateway device to send data to IoT cloud platforms on their behalf. All information looks like it is coming from one device, the gateway. 

Exist, as a technological solution provider, designed a generic IoT and data integration reference architecture for our customers, especially for the power industry.

The Data Integration layer handles the ingestion of the various data sources. It supports all types of connectors.

IoT Gateway acts as a gateway to connect your devices and accepts data streams using MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP messaging protocols. Data can be ingested as a batch or a real-time stream. With batch processing, data is collected in batches and then fed into an analytics system. A batch is a group of data points collected within a given period. Unlike stream processing, it does not immediately feed data into an analytics system, so results are not available in real-time.

With stream processing, data is fed into an analytics system piece by piece as soon as it is generated. Instead of processing a batch of data overtime, stream processing feeds each data point or a micro-batch directly into an analytics platform. This allows teams to produce key insights in near real-time.

Streaming platforms allow data transformation persistence and allow interactive queries on the streaming application. Kafka is the most popular choice among streaming platforms. 

ETL is the extract, transform, and load process for the data. While the ELT is the extract, load, and transform process. In ETL, data moves from the data source to staging and into the data warehouse. ELT lets the data destination to the transformation, eliminating the need for data staging.

Optionally, you can add a dataflow tool such as NiFi to provide a web UI, which design or control your data pipeline in a graphical representation. NiFi can deal with a great variety of data sources and formats.

For Stream Analytics, the popular choice is Apache Spark Streaming. It is a scalable and fault-tolerant stream processing system that allows data engineers and data scientists to process real-time data from various sources.

Data can be processed using complex algorithms, expressed with high-level functions. Finally, processed data can be pushed out to file systems, databases, and live dashboards. You can apply Spark’s machine learning and graph processing algorithms to data streams.

For the ETL jobs, you can apply data quality steps before loading it to a data warehouse. While for ELT, data is simply dumped into the data lake, and transformations happen on an as-needed basis, and only the data that needs to be analyzed at that time are transformed.

Hot path

    • analyzes data in near-real-time, as it arrives
    • events must be processed with very low latency
    • typically implemented using a stream processing engine
    • the output may trigger an alert or be written in a structured format that can be queried using analytical tools

Warm path

    • holds data that must be available immediately from the device for reporting and visualization

Cold path

    • performs batch processing at longer intervals (hourly or daily)
    • typically operates over large volumes of data, but the results don’t need to be as timely as the hot path.
    • captured and then fed into a batch process

Machine Learning allows predictive algorithms to be executed over historical telemetry data, enabling scenarios such as predictive maintenance. It requires training by telling a machine learning model what it’s trying to predict, similar to how a human child learns.

Speaker: Mr. Jejomar Dimayuga | Exist Technical Architect

Industrial IoT Stack

Sensors

    • Actual things that are located in your physical environment
    • Smart meters or actuators

Edge Devices

    • Can act as the concentrator/aggregator for all of your devices
    • Allow different protocols depending on the support of your devices

Gateway

    • Connectivity to your edge devices

Cloud (or on-premise infrastructure)

    • Where your applications run
    • Offers high availability and high scalability solutions

Insights

    • Where analytics are produced that can be based on historical events, failures, rules, or condition that can communicate back to your device
    • Where algorithms are performed after ingesting and storing the data

Consumption

    • How your data is consumed
    • How can it be displayed via the web, iOS, or Android devices

Security and encryption across the components are must-have. It is a vital requirement for all systems, especially in the IoT solution for energy. Security components such as SSL or HTTPS, LDAP Integration, Single Sign-On, Access Token are already in place.

We accommodate Access Token so we can ensure that your devices are secured in connection to your edge devices and IoT gateway.

We also offer a Single Sign-On authentication to your existing authentication features via the Oauth2.0 protocol.

We can also integrate your authentication via LDAP. We can connect your authentication and your road-based access control to an active directory in your organization if you have one.

To secure your communication layer, we can incorporate SSL or HTTPS with certificates from the latest update of the TLS version.

Another important aspect of any system nowadays is scalability and high availability. In this solution, we can incorporate Docker containerization via the Kubernetes platform. In this way, we can deploy your application or your IoT gateway into multiple replicas to ensure that it is highly available. We can:

    • Reach the maximum daily quota of your required messages
    • Reach the quota of connected devices 
    • Increase the ingestion throughput
    • Increase the processing throughput
    • Set up a DR environment in place to ensure that your operations will be continuous

All of these are in place already so that we can ensure that you will be able to perform your analytics and your business needs. On top of that, we can also integrate into your existing systems, may it be your billing system, billing, or offer system, CRSS, or else.

Speaker: Mr. Chris Silerio | VP for Operations

Things to Consider on Choosing an IoT Platform

    • The capability of your team
    • Geographic coverage
    • Timeline and budget
    • Your IoT and EDW roadmap
    • Your business billing model
    • Scalability of the platform
    • Method of connectivity
    • Integration flexibility
    • Device management
    • Cloud VS. on-premise

Developing your platform in-house is fine as long as you are not pressed by time. Otherwise, it might be better to start with a simple platform and develop on top of it.

Q&A

Q1: With the vast array of open standards for all the layers of IoT, is there a considered safe or conservative stop that anyone can use as a basis or a starter that is easy to pivot towards specific solutions as requirements get clearer? 

A: As shown on the Industrial IoT Stack diagram, we could have the base layer of the devices, followed by the edge devices if you want to go with edge computing. After that, we can set up an IoT gateway on cloud infrastructure.

It also depends on the network or protocol that the sensors, actuators, or your device are supporting. What matters most is that your platform can connect with these various open standards and not limit your entire solution. If there is a new protocol that comes in, your platform should be flexible enough to support these open standards.

 

Q2: What are actuators?

A: Actuators are mostly used in factories. These are devices that are connected to types of machinery. It typically sends telemetry data, like temperature, weight, the roughness of a substance.

 

Q3: What is the experience of Exist in developing IoT systems for energy efficiency applications?

A: We have a couple of projects on the integration of IoT devices, and it is still growing. Our forte is software development integration. But our experiences with these projects gave us enough exposure to the entire ecosystem.

 

Q4: Have you done any IoT applications for use in the Philippine market?

A: We are developing some right now for companies who are just starting their IoT projects. These companies are doing it in phases. We are currently in the first phase. (Company names cannot be disclosed yet.)

 

Q5: Given the poor internet connection in the Philippines, would IoT applications that HTTP use be a challenge?

A: High likely, cloud computing would be a challenge because it will always depend on internet connectivity. In scenarios that it is in remote areas, it would be better to go with edge computing provisioning. That is one of the advantages of an edge over cloud computing. 

Aside from internet connectivity, some providers also offer alternative communication layers, such as cellular networks.

 

Q6: Do you provide a complete solution, like sourcing sensors or edge devices, depending on the requirements?

A: No. There are only a few companies here in the Philippines that offer end-to-end solutions. We are not a hardware company. We are agnostic of software and hardware. We do more on the development of all these layers/components from the IoT devices up to the data integration. But we are partnered with companies that we may utilize to provide an almost end-to-end solution.

 

Q7: For an organization that has mostly in SCADA plus TLC equipment, what would a migration plan look like when moving to a more modern platform that allows a more open choice of technology stack?

A: IoT is not intended to replace SCADA and TLC. It is a different level/layer. Information from SCADA and TLC may be integrated into your IoT platform. We do not have to migrate as we can support SCADA and TLC.

 

Q8: With regards to data storage, would you still recommend Hadoop, or are there better alternatives?

A: We recommend that you go with the storage that can handle multiple parallel processing and the other factors that would support volume processing of data, and speed from streaming data, flowing data from different data sources to your storage devices. There are a lot of databases that support multiple parallel processing, like Greenplum, Oracle, Teradata, and Hadoop.

 

Q9: If I were to engage for an IoT application, what would be the start?

A: It might be better if you could consult first with a third-party company that already has the experience or an offering of IoT solutions in the market. It is quite hard to say outright what the specific software that we are going to use in your IoT platform. We need to undergo some discussions within your organization before we could provide a straightforward platform that you could use. We could always start simple. But regardless of how simple it is, we still need to know what are the factors that we should consider for your organization.

 

Q10: Can you offer an outsource service to support an IoT application?

A: We could somehow handle it, given that we have partners. You may also directly talk to hardware vendors, especially about edge computing devices. We can also give you a list of vendors that you could contact for each IoT component

Data Integration

Reliable Data Integration for Power in 2020

Reliable Data Integration for Power in 2020 768 487 Exist Software Labs

“…and when you connect data together, you get power.” 

– Tim Berners-Lee, computer scientist & inventor of the World Wide Web

Data Integration for Power

Way back in 2018, the world is already at a 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day mark. With the rapid growth in digital transformation and uses of modern-day technologies such as the Internet of Things, the upsurge of this number is simply beyond imagination.

Nowadays, businesses attempt to utilize the collected data and turn it into valuable information to improve their business processes. The process of collecting data has become easier for businesses these days. But the massive outpour of data also posed the risk of data wastage or not knowing how to use it.

In our previous blog, we have mentioned that IoT in power is still on the rise and will keep doing so in the coming years. But most power companies still face their biggest dilemma in dealing with a large amount of data yielded by IoT – data is siloed across different business units.

A data silo is a situation wherein only a selected group can access a particular data set which is isolated from the rest of the organization. The aftermath of having siloed data is problematic for businesses because its non-cohesive nature makes it hard for the teams to view it comprehensively, causing them to miss some useful connections of the collected data. Such also cause the absence of a single source of truth due to data duplication and inconsistent entries under the same account names.

What causes data silos?

According to the Harvard Business Review’s Breaking Down Data Silos, the following causes data silos:

  • Structural – programmers wrote the system application for a particular use or team, and data-sharing is not a requirement in the company
  • Political – there is a sense of proprietorship within the organization that hinders mutual access to the data.
  • Growth – new upgrades are being added to the system, but it is hard to reconcile and integrate the sets of data.
  • Vendor Lock-in – software vendors limit the data access for the users. 

Letting this issue persist in your organization will only make converting data into valuable insights more complex, with much likeliness of being ineffective. That is why combining data from different sources and giving the users a unified view is critical in data analytics. This process is called data integration

In times of the increasing trend in incorporating IoT in different functions of the power sector, dealing with mountains of data have become even complex. As mentioned earlier, the growth, more so, rapid growth, of the system makes it prone to becoming siloed.

It is noteworthy to understand the importance of understanding IoT platforms and the various ways of implementing it and how it could coexist and integrate it with data integration platforms. That way, you will be geared up for the boundless changes that modern-day demands and technologies will present.

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Enterprise Technology Solutions Leader, Exist Reveals Top 5 IT Trends for 2019. Java, Java Philippines

Exist Software Labs, Inc Reveals Top 5 IT Trends for 2019

Exist Software Labs, Inc Reveals Top 5 IT Trends for 2019 768 487 Exist Software Labs

IT Trends in 2019

The demand for business companies to go digital continues as they face the new year with new expectations, competitors, channels, threats, and opportunities.

Digitalization has created a new breed of market that companies of all sizes- small, medium-sized, or even large corporations cannot ignore. Traditional businesses have now accepted using digital transformation as a business strategy— to deliver products and services through the web, reap data from every market interaction then gain insights to rapidly optimize their value chain and help them increase competitive advantage.

By transforming digitally, businesses are able to build a connection with their customers, speed up the pace of innovation, and, as a result, claim a greater share of profit.

Today, companies that invest in digital transformation are building an edge over those that don’t, which will enable them to succeed in reaching the expanding digital lives of consumers that encompass the rules of engagement that strongly influence customer loyalty.

With this profound effect on business organizations, allow us to share what are the IT Trends our top executives think would make an impact by the year 2019:

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Top 5 IT Trends

Blockchain

By allowing digital information to be distributed but with a highly secured transaction, blockchain technology created the backbone of the new type of Internet. What do we really mean when we say blockchain? According to Don and Alex Tapscott, authors of the book Blockchain Revolution (2016), “the blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value”. The growing list of records found in blockchain is called blocks which are linked using cryptography.

In an interview with Mr. Mike Lim, President & CEO of Exist, he stated, “Blockchain has been really gaining quick traction not only because of bitcoin or cryptocurrency but because of the promise of more transparent but secured communication between B2B companies or even B2C depending on what vertical you are.” This IT trend gives internet users the ability to create value and authenticates digital information. By storing data across its peer-to-peer network, blockchain eliminates a number of risks that come with data being held centrally. Every network participant validates the transaction so that the data stored is immutable and cannot be forged.

Real-world applications of blockchain technology are becoming more mainstream resulting in the amount of transactional data becoming huge.

Combining blockchain and big data sparks a new level of analytics. Executives believe that the blockchain promise of secure, traceable transactions and improved transparency of information can streamline supply chain management. Thus, continuing to make a disruptive change in technology by the year 2019.

 

Big Data

With today’s digital technologies, it’s possible to analyze your data and turn it into insights rapidly. This IT Trend enables enterprises to make better decisions.

According to Gartner, big data is high-volume, high-velocity, and/or high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing that enable enhanced insight, decision-making, and process automation. As the head of the healthcare services at Exist and the VP for Sales and Marketing, Mr. Willex Perez shared with us his thoughts: “Imagine the possibilities of what big data can do for predicting illnesses. If you collect enough clinical information you’ll be able to compare your status or your clinical values with others. After which, you can search available research or studies to check your risk rating as an individual.”

Emphasizing on healthcare, Mr. Willex added that among the growth  IT trends the use of big data in healthcare will be essential. “With analytics, enterprises will be able to drive innovation and come up with intelligent business decisions. While organizations collect data for analytics purposes combined with IoT as another major source for data,” Mr. Willex concludes, “it is inevitable to use big data analytics to complete the picture.”

 

Internet of Things (IoT)

Countless business opportunities are in the firehose of IoT data as products and services have become more connected. The Internet of Things refers to the network of devices such as home appliances, and mechanical and digital devices that contain electronics, software, and connectivity which allows them to interact and exchange data.

Considered as one of his top IT trends, Mr. Christopher Silerio, the VP for Operations at Exist, believes IoT sensors provide us a valuable real-time update of the exchange of data with the sources. He shares, “there will be a time when there will be more data exchanges happening between sensors even without human interaction.  From smart appliances or smart meters, devices will continuously send data signals to a certain component or machine, providing information in real-time. It’s reasonable to say that IoT has begun to transform the business landscape and is expected to continue in 2019.”

 

Cloud

While IoT generates huge amounts of data, the cloud ensures that these are captured and stored properly. The simplicity and accessibility of cloud computing to manage vast amounts of data remain a catalyst enabling the rapid expansion of IoT. Cloud computing provides small to medium enterprises the ability to enjoy low implementation costs for their total IT infrastructure and software systems.

Utilizing the abilities of cloud computing, enterprises of all sizes can deploy applications a lot quicker and cheaper compared to the cost of setting up whole IT Infrastructure and service by themselves. According to Forrester’s predictions for 2018, the total global public cloud market will be $178B in 2018, up from $146B in 2017, and will continue to grow at a 22% compound annual growth rate. From this perspective, the cloud seems to be a key driver of digital transformation and economic growth.

“Cloud makes it easier for organizations to worry more about their business process rather than infrastructures. It makes it easier for startups to build their business quickly,” reveals Mr. Jonas Lim, the VP of Technical Services at Exist. “As early as almost a decade ago, we believed that cloud computing is a real game-changer and it has proven to be true as the future continues to bring us into a world of unlimited connectivity empowered by the cloud,” he further adds.

 

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence or AI doesn’t only apply to robotics. As a branch of computer science, AI involves the development of computer programs to complete tasks which would otherwise require human intelligence. As evidence of its spread, AI is even available for use along with other cloud solutions to which businesses can just subscribe to.

Internet technology companies also make use of  AI to optimize their IT infrastructures. In fact, according to Wikibon: “AI-optimized application infrastructure is one of today’s hottest IT trends in the IT business. More vendors are introducing IT platforms that accelerate and automate AI workloads through pre-built combinations of storage, compute, and interconnect resources.”

Mr. Jonas Lim pointed out the increasing use of chatbots in business services. Chatbots are programs built to automatically engage with received messages simulating actual human interaction. In addition, artificial intelligence might just be ready to explode with its use, particularly inside the healthcare industry.

What started with manufacturing has now spread to knock and open the doors to a greater digital business scale but now with analytics and computing intelligence as an IT Trend at the forefront of cutting-edge changes in the upcoming years. “[Like] growing population of robotics is bound to happen,” Mr. Willex added, “and although we don’t know the future, it is quite evident that interacting with AI will soon be part of our everyday lives.”