LNS Research defines IIoT as :

The Industrial IoT should be understood as a subset of the broader IoT, where these connections exist mainly to produce physical goods for the marketplace as well as to maintain the physical assets of production. ...by 2020, this network is expected to include:

• Devices

• Sensors

• Instrumentation

• Materials

• Mobile and Fixed Assets

• Products

• People

For manufacturers to capture the true value of the IIoT LNS Research sees four main buckets of capabilities that are critical in enabling the Industrial Internet of Things platform:

• Connectivity

• Cloud

• Big Data Analytics

• Application Development

PlantConnect is an important element of the broader IIoT tools/technologies landscape. PlantConnect is present directly in three of the above four buckets, and indirectly in one:

Connectivity: We have a library of drivers to acquire data from the several types of “things”. Our native communication drivers, and OPC client interface enables connectivity to almost all possible connectable industrial things like PLCs, controllers, I/O modules, DCS, etc. Further, we are continuously adding new communication drivers to our existing driver library. For a current list of supported drivers, please see this link.

Cloud: PlantConnect being a web-based solution, is natively cloud enabled. Data acquired from devices located across geographies, is centrally stored in the PlantConnect server. This server is accessible from anywhere via a simple web-browser or a tablet. The server can be hosted on-premises by the customer, or hosted by Ascent Intellimation, or hosted in the public cloud (Amazon AWS, etc). Please see this link for several deployment options.

Big Data Analysis: On the huge amounts of data collected from field/floor devices, PlantConnect can run simple to advanced calculations and algorithms to generate insightful inferences. We also have Big Data specialist partners who can do more advanced analytics on your data.

Application Development: PlantConnect is a highly configurable platform, where you can control and configure various aspects of connectivity and visualization. The platform is designed such that it can be easily customized to various verticals, packing domain specific knowledge into the product.