Italian ‘internet-of-things’ (IoT) company Eurotech is offering its latest industrial IoT software framework with Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT platform in all its gateways and edge devices. It has also announced it will add the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system to its edge products.
The Italian company produces embedded hardware for industrial IoT solutions, including gateways, servers, control systems, and boards. Its Everyware Software Framework (ESF) is a multi-platform application development environment for edge devices and IoT gateways.
The latest version of its ESF application now features Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT platform, as standard. The integration provides secure access to the configuration settings, diagnostics, and management of connected devices.
Both Eurotech and Software AG are well regarded within the burgeoning industrial loT space. Both companies appeared in a July leaderboard of the top IIoT platform providers, compiled by consulting firm Quadrant, behind the likes of PTC and IBM. Software AG has appeared elsewhere, too, notably in Gartner’s parallel list of top providers, from May.
Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT platform provides capabilities for device management, data management and competitive capabilities relating to integration, analytics and security. It supports more than 150 pre-integrated devices and 300 industrial protocols – the widest protocol support of any platform, notes Gartner.
It works as an IoT-as-a-service solution, including high availability, multi-cluster deployment options, and code-free integration of devices supporting low-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies, including narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), lightweight M2M (LWM2M), and LoRa.
Eurotech said the addition of the Cumulocity IoT platform will enable customers to “bridge their existing IT and OT infrastructure with an open and modular IoT solution, while leveraging a carrier-grade IoT platform as a solid foundation to accelerate time-to-market for new IoT applications”.
Giuseppe Surace, chief product officer of Eurotech, said: “By adding connectivity to the Cumulocity IoT platform, our customers can choose from a broader range of integration options, and reduce their time to market by leveraging a configuration-based approach to building industrial IoT solutions.
“Additionally, we are adding greater flexibility by offering a seamless integration with different IoT cloud providers, all of which makes ESF a powerful framework for open and integrated IoT solutions.”
Bernd Gross, senior vice president for IoT and cloud at Software AG, said: “A vast ecosystem of third party products and services are available without the risk of ‘vendor lock-in’. Businesses can develop and implement IoT services at their own pace and at the optimal balance between risk and ambition.”
Meanwhile, Eurotech will add Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system to its edge computing offering, starting from Eurotech’s liquid-cooled high performance embedded computers (HPEC), designed for sophisticated artificial super-intelligence (ASI) for edge applications like autonomous driving.
Canonical will also engage in the Eclipse Kura project, the open-source Java based IoT edge framework, by publishing a Kura ‘snap’, a Linux application packaging format, making Kura available on a wider number of Linux distributions and supported across more hardware.
Snap support will also be provided on Eurotech’s ESF. Eurotech said management is easier when Kura is deployed as a ‘snap’ on a device, with automatic updates and higher-grade security.
Marco Carrer, chief technology officer at Eurotech, said: “IoT and AI on the Edge are eco-system plays. With the collaboration between Eurotech and Canonical, customers will have even more choices and more ready-to-use building blocks for their Edge Computing and Edge Inference projects.”
Tom Canning, vice president of global sales for IoT and devices at Canonical, commented: “Canonical and Eurotech will help enable further innovation and development for customers building Edge computing projects whilst reducing complexity. In addition, having Kura available as a Snap will open the framework up to a wider pool of developers to benefit from.”
Last week, Eurotech introduced a new open, modular, multi-cloud IoT architecture, developed with US software companies Cloudera and Red Hat.
