Connect Legacy Systems with Edge-as-a-Service

Aug. 9, 2022

Advantech partners with Hivecell to deliver edge-as-a-service technology to connect legacy systems to the network edge and cloud.

David Greenfield, editor in chief

Advantech and Hivecell technologies for connecting legacy systems to IoT devices for scalable data collection and management.

One of the biggest challenges of the digital transformation for existing manufacturing operations is accessing data from legacy production technologies and connecting them for greater analytic insights. To help address this, Advantech is working with Hivecell, a supplier of edge-as-a-service (EaaS) technology, as part of Advantech’s Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) development. The combination of Advantech’s industrial hardware and Hivecell’s EaaS platform is meant to ease the process of connecting legacy systems to IoT devices for scalable data collection and management.

Jerry O’Gorman, vice president of Industrial IoT Division, Advantech.

According to Advantech, the enormous amounts of data generated by connecting production systems can “be an obstacle to efficient operations if end users depend on cloud-only processing. While the cloud has value as a storage space, it cannot enable the day-to-day operational and safety improvements that EaaS makes possible for critical and real-time decision-making.”

Jerry O’Gorman, vice president of Industrial IoT Division at Advantech, says, “The continuous growth of connected smart devices and machines is driving a need for cloud-native architectures to be built on the edge, addressing increasing computing, throughput, and privacy needs closer to source.”

“Hivecell provides the industry’s first edge-as-a-service platform enabling cloud-like compute power deployed on premises,” says Jeffrey Ricker, CEO of Hivecell. “By combining forces, Advantech and Hivecell jointly provide customers with a complete edge solution at the data source.”

Hivecell’s EaaS reportedly connects legacy systems to gateways, edge computers, 5G routers, and other IoT devices for scalable data management. By collecting and processing data at the edge, Hivecell says data flow can be improved because useless data is efficiently discarded on site. “Only relevant data is sent back to headquarters and/or the cloud. The result is deployment and management with on-premises computing power for hundreds, or even thousands, of locations,” says Ricker.

IoT gateways act as the bridge between devices and the network, converting physical information into digital data for transmission from the edge. Raw data flows through a gateway at the edge where it is processed by machine learning and other analytics. In the end, only business-relevant data is sent to the cloud.

Advantech products recommended for use with Hivecell’s EaaS, include:

UNO-238: Compact IoT edge computer with Intel Core i Processor;
UNO-148: High-performance DIN-rail control computer with Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake Core i7/i5/i3 CPU;
SKY-640V2: 4U rackmount Intel Xeon scalable GPU server;
MIC-770 V2: Compact fanless system with 10th Gen Intel Xeon/Core i CPU socket.