Eurotech enters IBM Edge Ecosystem

Edge analytics derived from IBM Cloud Pak for Data on Eurotech’s Rugged Edge Computers, deployed leveraging IBM’s Edge Application Manager, enables AI-supported Business Decisions in the Field, far outside the Data Center

Amaro (Italy), May 5th, 2020 – Eurotech, a leading provider of rugged and industrial-grade embedded boards and systems, Edge computing platforms and Internet of Things (IoT) enablement solutions announces its participation in the IBM Edge Ecosystem (including Data & AI) from multi-cloud to Edge.

IBM’s new Edge computing and Telco network solutions powered by Red Hat technology provide an open innovation platform that brings an Ecosystem of partners together to co-create and innovate at the edge on a global scale. IBM’s Cloud Pak solutions enable Enterprises and Telcos to develop new containerized solutions that can be built once deployed to run anywhere. The IBM Edge Application Manager is an autonomous management solution designed to enable AI, analytics and IoT workloads to be deployed and remotely managed, delivering real-time analysis and insight at scale and can now also be leveraged with Eurotech devices.

“The convergence of 5G and edge computing is set to spark new levels of innovation,” says Evaristus Mainsah, general manager, IBM Cloud Pak Ecosystem, “and this in turn can enable and fuel a broad ecosystem of providers to co-create for a growing set of edge opportunities. Our collaboration with Eurotech can bring value to our joint clients needing high-performance rugged edge systems to run edge analytics and apps. Furthermore, the combination of Eurotech’s Everyware Software Framework (ESF) with the IBM Edge Application Manager enabled on Eurotech devices opens access to IoT data for data scientists and DevOps teams, enabling them to reimagine how to build, deploy and manage AI-enabled edge applications at scale.”

Eurotech`s rugged, high performance computer systems are fanless and sealed compute platforms designed for harsh environments and demanding applications as diverse as transportation, including autonomous vehicles, manufacturing, collaborative robots, security & surveillance and railways. These highly reliable systems, regardless of whether they are edge computing systems, IoT gateway products or the platforms built on Eurotech’s HPC technology are passively or warm water cooled and come with a wide range of CPU, hardware acceleration (GPUs & AI), communication, GPS and storage options to address different edge computing needs.

Edge computing solutions, especially the IoT Gateway products are offered in combination with Eurotech’s IoT Edge Middleware ESF (Everyware Software Framework), a feature-rich IoT Edge Framework that scales from embedded Linux devices to powerful Edge servers, where ESF runs as a virtual gateway in a container. To ease the development on edge devices, ESF provides flexible device twin modelling over the leading field bus protocols across multiple vertical industries. Edge developers can leverage the rich IoT middleware functionality using powerful APIs, deploy full-fledge application running natively in the container or use ESF Wires to visually compose data pipelines for their Edge devices.

“We appreciate the possibility to extend our long lasting collaboration with IBM, joining an ecosystem to effectively enable vital enterprise technology like advanced analytics at the edge, in the world of Operational Technologies (OT)” commented Robert Andres, Chief Strategy Officer at Eurotech. “The integration of IBM Cloud Pak for Data to build and train analytics models that IBM Edge Application Manager can deploy onto Eurotech’s Edge Computing Hardware, including our High-Performance Edge Computers, significantly lowers the barrier of entry for customers that need to leverage computational power for AI and analytics applications in challenging environments”.

Eurotech, share a vision to bring OT and IT into a software defined, open standards-based ecosystem approach. Both companies believe in and contribute heavily to open source and open standards.

Eurotech’s edge computing solutions enable businesses to collect and analyze data in real time, thus gaining meaningful insights into their day to day operations. The rugged (and where required high-performance) hardware from Eurotech will help clients extend compute and analytical capabilities to rough and demanding environments, addressing the needs of various vertical markets including industrial (manufacturing, energy & utilities) to mobile solutions (transportation, construction, agriculture and rolling stock). This will make enterprise operations easier by leveraging the recommendations and actions suggested by AI & analytics at the edge and without any human intervention. Better business outcomes can be achieved with a reduced latency combined with state-of-art data security, resiliency and uninterrupted productivity.