By Dr. Gary D. Butler, Founder, Chairman and CEO Camgian Microsystems
In 2013 Camgian began work on a new product. Leveraging a wealth of experience in building advanced sensor systems and technologies, we itemized a list of capability gaps and issues that we foresaw for the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) market. One of those critical items was the efficient management of high data volumes created in-situ by IoT sensors. Specifically, the large projected growth of sensor deployments and thus data generation on IoT networks would quickly surpass the capacity of existing IT infrastructure.
With this in-mind, our engineering team began architecting one of the first edge computing platforms for the IoT market in early 2013. Specifically, it was our vision to redefine the relationship between IoT and cloud computing, where real-time multi-sensor processing and analytics were executed at the source of the data (i.e. on-site) with the cloud supporting higher level tasks such as device management, information storage, big-data analytics, visualization, and reporting.
Today, those efforts have translated into our award winning product called Egburt™ (Germanic term for “bright edge”), which leverages a flexible, distributed computing architecture for generating critical operational insights from high volume, multi-modal sensor data. Our latest version, Egburt™ 2.0, comprises an intelligent edge server that supports wireless connectivity with industrial machines, data loggers and sensors and the ingestion and real-time local processing of multi-sensor data streams. A secure, LTE cellular connection provides remote edge server management through Egburt’s cloud-based Insight™ software, which includes flexible user configuration, analytics development, and information presentation tools.
Egburt’s novel distributed computing architecture has been recognized for its ability to address critical scalability issues with big data applications in ways that push the limits of conventional IoT platforms. “The combination of cloud and edge computing will enable more flexible and robust architectures. Egburt™ is a prime example of how this evolution is happening in practice,” says ABI Research in their 2015 Hot Tech Innovators Report.
Recently, we announced the successful demonstration of an advanced information technology built on Egburt™ that supports radical improvements in the operation, maintenance, and reliability of aging public infrastructure. The new Intelligent Decision Support (IDS) System, which was built through a contract with the US Army Corps of Engineers, is a novel enterprise solution designed to improve safety and reduce unplanned downtime of infrastructure assets such as locks, dams, bridges and levees. Key to the system’s design is its capacity to intelligently process large-scale sensor data from industrial assets in real-time.
In summary, the unique requirements of IoT will drive new architectural approaches in IT and demand for new edge computing applications across a broad range of markets. Through our current contract activities, Egburt is delivering on the early vision of its concept design and demonstrating the key benefits that edge computing is positioned to bring to the IoT market.
About Gary Butler
Gary Butler is the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Camgian Microsystems. From its early work in building advanced sensor technologies and solutions for organizations such as DARPA, he has lead Camgian’s evolution into a multi-million dollar revenue business and a leading company in the Internet of Things (IoT) market. During this period Camgian has been named by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in the US, Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the most entrepreneurial companies in America, The Silicon Review as one of the top 50 fastest growing technology companies, CIO Review as one of the top 50 most promising companies in IoT and Compass Intelligence as one of the world’s top companies in IoT innovation and execution. Moreover, ABI Research featured Camgian in their 2015 Hot Tech Innovators report, which identified the company as one of the world’s top tech start-ups.
Central to these efforts was Dr. Butler’s direction of the company’s latest product, Egburt, whose design leverages a novel edge computing architecture that supports real-time, sensor-enabled IoT solutions. Since its launch, Egburt has received significant industry recognition including being featured in CLSA Americas’ Deep Field report on IoT as one of the promising new offerings in the IoT market and being named Compass Intelligence IoT Innovative Product of the Year at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He has been a speaker and panelist at events such as Liveworx, the IoT Global Summit, CLSA Americas IoT Innovation Summit, M2M Evolution, European IoT Summit and TEDx. In addition, he has been recognized by Postscapes as a 2015 IoT CEO of the Year award winner.
