TECHNOLOGY
What Are Intelligent Assets and Why do Businesses Need Them?
Data surrounding intelligent assets is exploding.
This information is priceless, but only if it can be correctly analyzed and put to use. As a result, companies that have intelligent assets can naturally make wise business decisions.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation defines intelligent assets as tangible objects that can sense, communicate and record information about themselves and their surroundings. This definition encompasses IoT objects, items without wireless communication, assets that are not continuously transmitting information, etc.
Intelligent assets can also be described as their digital twin or the real-time data the asset produces. Any sensor in an asset can share real-life data using smart asset software applications, providing context for actual physical processes. The capacity to view your assets with all the additional information that may be available to them is what intelligent assets should ultimately provide.
Intelligent assets can be seen everywhere – at home and at work. We have smartwatches that can inform us about the time, heart rate, sleep analysis, how many steps we walked, message notifications, meeting reminders, etc, making our lives much more manageable. Similarly, when it comes to businesses, having intelligent assets can play a huge role in helping companies pave the way to make informed business decisions.
For many years, the manufacturing and service sectors have emphasized raising the return on assets. New Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)-based technologies simplify monitoring and boost asset efficiency. The IIoT’s connectivity and insight have enormous potential and are currently widely employed to prevent unexpected downtime, save operating costs, increase productivity, and enhance safety and compliance.
The machinery, tools, vehicles, and other items used in the production process are assets in the industrial context. Simply connected assets that use the Industrial Internet of Things or IIoT to share real-time data on their status, health, and performance are called intelligent assets. They help data to provide extraordinary insights to organizations, resulting in more informed business decision-making.
Intelligent assets should include fully autonomous assets capable of performing operational tasks like self-ordering components, creating service requests, and ensuring optimal usage rather than being limited to just transmitting the information.More data is generated as more assets are connected, allowing businesses to gain more insights. As a result, companies are beginning a new era where every object can be intelligent & entirely autonomous.
The utilization of intelligent sensors and actuators to improve and increase manufacturing and industrial processes is called the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) also goes by Industry 4.0.
Businesses may identify inefficiencies and problems earlier, save time and money, and enhance business intelligence efforts using networked sensors and actuators. The IIoT has enormous potential for improving supply chain efficiency, traceability, sustainable and green manufacturing methods, and quality control.
Nowadays, IIoT is included in practically every article on industrial business, and for a good reason. Various manufacturing and service industries are already experiencing measurable, revolutionary, inventive improvement. The core of any IIoT-driven business development is intelligent assets. Intelligent assets can improve decision-making, productivity, business relationships, cost, and risk management, enabling organizations to act more strategically and effectively. Intelligent Asset Management Businesses are being transformed through intelligent assets, digital transformation, and Industry 4.0. Intelligent assets mix the Internet of Things and other data sources with data science and machine learning to provide asset management capabilities.
Building credibility and trust among many stakeholders is one of the significant problems that an intelligent asset can solve. In an ecosystem economy, as the number of partners grows, so do the touchpoints and the number of decisions that must be visible. Intelligent assets ensure an automated and transparent decision-making, lessening the stakeholders’ burden. As a result, intelligent assets are a crucial component of the ecosystem economy since they answer its central problem of credibility and trust.
Other issues that intelligent assets can solve include maximizing the potential of asset utilization, reducing the amount of time that assets are idle or inactive, reducing the difficulty of sorting through the enormous amounts of data collected to find insightful information, and the stakeholders across the value chain have security and credibility challenges due to the lack of transparency in corporate procedures.
Intelligent asset management or IAM solutions simplify business processes and improve the performance of essential assets by combining data and AI. Here are three benefits intelligent asset management can provide for businesses:
Creating Value to Expand the Business
By improving asset availability and reliability, intelligent asset management aids revenue growth.
For some tasks, autonomous vehicles are used by mining corporations. Equipment can be remotely monitored, perhaps from around the world, to maintain the asset’s proper operation. This allows for the monitoring of oil pressure or temperature. Robots in deep mines can work continuously, reducing the chance of injury from dangerous situations like fire, water, collapse or poisonous air contaminants.
Outsmarting the Competition
Implementing industry-best practices, such as more environmentally friendly operations, becomes simpler with intelligent asset management.
Intelligent asset management systems may integrate AI, weather data, climate risk analytics and carbon accounting capabilities, enabling businesses to spend less time curating this complicated data and more time finding insights and acting on them.
Automating and Managing Processes
Intelligent asset management aims to automate business operations. This improves uptime, productivity, and costs by streamlining asset maintenance and management to eliminate bottlenecks and manual labor.
Companies utilize integrated workplace management systems that employ data, IoT and AI in building and space management. These technologies support businesses in creating a secure, adaptable work environment, boosting and enhancing operational effectiveness.
Asset intelligence is a broad and in-depth database of information about connected objects (assets) used in business settings. Business leaders can use this information to comprehend all the facets of an organization’s assets in real time and make more informed business decisions.
4 Reasons Why Businesses Need Intelligent Assets
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Making Informed Business Decisions
The foundation of a sound business thrives on solid evidence and facts extracted from data. Data plays a significant role in assisting businesses to understand the potential business improvements and any required changes needed to help companies to grow. Intelligent asset data may gather, analyze and use information to help decision-makers make informed decisions at operational and strategic levels with the push of a button. Smart assets can potentially prevent nearly all human errors during data collection.
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Reducing Asset Downtime
Intelligent assets can offer real-time visibility into the condition of the equipment. Advanced analytics can predict and prevent avoidance of production halts and other issues even before they arise. Therefore, unplanned downtime may be cut in half by using intelligent assets.
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Maintaining Better Customer Relations
If your customers depend on your products for productivity, reducing downtime frequency and duration is essential for long-term success. Thanks to intelligent assets, you can identify issues remotely, even before they arise.
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Determining Better Productivity
Data by intelligent assets offers tremendous insight into how assets are being used, identifies production gaps, and spots inefficiencies and pain points where errors are most frequently made. Huge productivity increases can be achieved by using that knowledge to optimize production procedures, and progress can be continuously tracked in real-time. Finding the ideal low-code platform or device isn’t always necessary to get started with intelligent assets. Instead, your everyday intelligent asset is your ability to work in an adaptable setting to implement the process. Artificial intelligence (AI) must adopt specific attributes to enable your assets wisely effective. Its user interface must be clear and straightforward. An intelligent asset can provide a more consumer-oriented approach, eliminating technological jargon.
With the fourth industrial revolution, businesses must build, incorporate and use more intelligent assets to make better-informed business decisions in this fast-paced and ever-changing world.
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TECHNOLOGY
Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3
AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.
Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:
Next-generation chips
This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.
The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.
As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.
Zero-ETL integrations
AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.
A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.
The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.
Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.
Amazon Q
A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.
Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
TECHNOLOGY
HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces
Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).
Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.
The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.
Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.
“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”
Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.
“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”
Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
TECHNOLOGY
Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud
Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.
It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.
MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.
Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says
In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.
With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.
Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.
“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“
MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.
Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
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