Edge computing is revolutionizing the way we process data and monitor and control physical equipment. It enables industries to remotely monitor and control critical assets, merging the worlds of operational technologies and information technology that have been separate for decades. Edge computing puts the processing where it is needed, on the equipment generating the data, reducing latency, and providing the capability to process more data, securely, and cost-effectively. Examples of this are abundant; industrial water systems monitoring energy usage of pumps at the edge, railroad crossings in remote areas running edge monitoring that alerts maintenance personnel before outages occur, and remote drilling sites running edge AI algorithms to direct equipment downhole. At ClearBlade, we recognized the value of edge computing over a decade ago and we have built many of these solutions with our customers over the years. In doing so we also realized our customers needed something better, something more immediate to allow them to realize a return on their investments much more rapidly.

Based on the feedback from our customers, we created an application called Intelligent Assets, one that is customizable per customer, per vertical, delivering the immediate ROI they all demanded. Intelligent Assets gives our customers, the business users, immediate results, all without the need to involve their internal IT departments. We achieved this by focusing the functionality on the operational user instead of the developer. Now we didn’t ignore the developer, in fact, we spent many many years proving our technologies to the developer community, so we have all of the developer tooling necessary for IT and IoT experts to build custom applications. The real need the industry has is bridging the gap between operational technology (OT) professionals (the people in charge of SCADA and MES systems) and the data scientists building revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) models to dramatically modernize and improve the complex processes. Intelligent Assets puts the power of data ingestion and remote device configuration into the hands of very experienced OT professionals across multiple industries, simplifying how to connect to any asset in the business to stream real-time data. Intelligent Assets supplies this data to the Data Scientist, working with their AI tools of choice to build models to automate and improve processes. Once these models are built, Intelligent Assets allows the business to operationalize these models by running them in the cloud or at the edge with the click of a button, greatly simplifying the deployment and execution of these algorithms. Bridging the gap between these works is at the heart of what companies need of IoT, Edge computing, and AI TODAY – not in 6 months or 2 years.

In addition to making it easier to bridge the gap between operations and data science, there is also a challenge in deploying solutions at the edge, and at scale. Customizing and managing just a few edge devices is not a big issue, but managing thousands, hundreds of thousands, and eventually, millions of edges over time is an enormous challenge. How do you maintain security? How do you control updates to all the edges, some of the edges, or one edge? How do you roll back changes to the edge? How do you visualize and monitor your edge deployments? What happens when you replace or change the hardware? These challenges must be addressed now in order to create and deploy an effective and resilient Intelligent Assets customized solution.

This is why ClearBlade has chosen to partner with Sixsq by leveraging Nuvla’s edge-to-cloud platform as a service that simplifies the management of edge applications. Now companies can realize the power of our award-winning Intelligent Assets application at the edge by leveraging Nuvla to install, secure, and manage your entire network of edge devices. With Nuvla and ClearBlade, it’s simple to monitor and control any asset in your business at the edge.

By making Intelligent Assets available via Nuvla, any company can easily configure, deploy, and secure the same application used by the largest companies in the world to monitor and control their assets. This is why ClearBlade is so excited about our partnership with SixSq. Together we simplify the complex world of IoT, Edge, and AI and allow companies to immediately realize a return on investment by operationalizing and monetizing all of that data at the edge.