Within the next few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) market is expected to reach $1.6 trillion for industrial industries, $1.2 trillion for commercial industries, and $1 trillion for consumer industries. Although this suggests a positive outlook for the market, companies are struggling to generate intelligence from operational data collected by connected machines. For example, McKinsey & Company reported that less than one percent of the data being generated by 30,000 sensors on an offshore oil rig is currently being used to make decisions. Edge computing solves this problem with the help of big data, streaming analytics, and machine learning by processing data locally and in real-time.
FogHorn is a leading developer of “edge intelligence” software for industrial and commercial IoT applications. FogHorn’s software platform brings the power of machine learning and advanced analytics to the on-premise edge environment, enabling a new class of applications for advanced monitoring and diagnostics, asset performance optimization, operational intelligence and predictive maintenance use cases.
FogHorn’s solutions are ideally suited for OEMs, systems integrators and end customers in markets such as manufacturing, power and water, oil and gas, mining, transportation, healthcare, retail, as well as smart grid, smart city and smart car applications.
Navigator of FogHorn Systems
David C. King is the CEO of FogHorn Systems. Currently, King supports FogHorn’s global customers and partners as they roll out a broad range of powerful edge intelligence solutions for industrial and commercial systems. He also continues to design and develop innovative, new capabilities and extend FogHorn’s leadership in a fast-changing market. Prior to FogHorn, King led AirTight Networks, a technology leader in secure cloud-managed Wi-Fi, through four successful up rounds of VC funding as co-founder and CEO. David also served as President and CEO of Proxim, a pioneer in WLANs and the first publicly-traded Wi-Fi company.
Innovating in the IoT Space
Up until the advent of edge computing, industrial players had no way to reconcile the mass quantities of IoT data in real-time. Transporting data to the cloud for processing is expensive and slow, which is unsuitable for the real-time needs of industrial process manufacturing, where thousands of sensors constantly send data at the rate of every 20 or 30 milliseconds. FogHorn’s technology enables businesses to identify the data that matters at the network edge or sensor-level – the anomalies or patterns unearthed through analytics – and transfer it to the cloud for further processing. This data is only a tiny fraction of the total amount other practices would capture.
Industry Readiness
Almost every notable hardware vendor has a ruggedized line of products promoting edge processing. This indicates that the market is prime for Industrial IoT (IIoT) adoption. With technology giants announcing software stacks for the edge, there is little doubt that this momentum will only accelerate during 2018. Furthermore, traditional industries, like manufacturing, that have been struggling to showcase differentiated products, will now embrace edge analytics to drive new revenue streams and/or significant yield improvements for their customers.
The Solutions That Set FogHorn Apart
FogHorn’s principal advantage stems from their unique, high-speed, tiny footprint compute and machine learning engine. FogHorn designed the CEP (complex event processing) engine from scratch rather than shrinking down existing “big data” engines developed for resource-unlimited cloud environments. This enables FogHorn to run the complete IoT edge analytics software stack immediately next to machine data sources. Because of this, connected cars and autonomous vehicles, for example, will be able to process data from its instruments and sensors locally, in-car in real-time, which will enable critical safety developments such as accident avoidance, emergency braking, as well as mission-critical systems monitoring airbag failure, and more.
Benefits Gained by FogHorn’s Customers
FogHorn’s Lightning™ software platform allows businesses with distributed operations to derive actionable insights as close as possible to IoT-connected machines and the operations technology (OT) control systems and sensors attached to those machines. Using Lightning, businesses can accelerate their digital transformation projects by spending less time and money on bandwidth costs and end-to-end integration tasks, and focusing more on the delivery of next-generation applications to optimize machine performance, increase total output, improve process yield, and reduce both production and energy consumption costs.
Future Roadmap
FogHorn has pioneered a global shift to edge intelligence, comprised of real-time analytics and machine learning deployed on virtually any device in industrial and commercial operations. The FogHorn team already sees the transformational results the technology has deployed across a wide range of industries. They believe the continuous push for innovation will result in the adoption of FogHorn’s software in a large percentage of the projected billions of connected devices in the years to come.
