Asset Data Provider

The industrial world is changing: more and more companies are turning to digitalization and automation to make their production more efficient, flexible and future-proof. The key to this lies in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which enables intelligent networking and communication between machines, plants, sensors, systems and the Cloud.

But despite the great potential, industrial companies repeatedly encounter challenges that make the successful implementation and operation of IIoT solutions difficult. With the Asset Data Provider, Balluff offers an integrative solution to overcome these challenges and accelerate digital transformation.

The top 3 IIoT challenges for industrial companies

1. Overcoming data heterogeneity in the OT landscape.

Ideally, plants and production facilities are newly built or modernized all at once so that IIoT-enabled machines are installed together. These have digital interfaces that can provide data. Often, industrial productions consist of a wide variety of existing machines that are not capable of outputting data.

In either case, a heterogeneous data landscape is created: access to data is difficult, the data is located in silos, there are different types of data as well as obsolete and diversified data types. In addition, the data originates across numerous sites, systems, and facilities.

Whether with a brownfield or greenfield approach, Balluff's Asset Data Provider is able to pull data from all of these assets, transform it, and make it available in IT systems in a compatible manner.

2. It's all about data quality

Digitization and automation projects are highly dependent on the quality of data. In the industrial environment, contextual data, also called metadata, is often lacking. For this reason, relevant data must first be obtained from raw data and transformed accordingly into usable information. Another obstacle here is that stand-alone data cannot be easily processed further and accordingly do not provide any added value. They must first be contextualized and linked to other data.

The solution? Our Asset Data Provider offers a common data model. It enables the central bundling, translation and processing of all data the Asset Data Provider is able to normalize and transform data and thus create a uniform data layer. It forms the basis for further efficient data analysis and processing.

3. Lack of know-how, high costs and lack of time

Digital transformation in industry is progressing only slowly. This is often due to high skill barriers, a lack of talent, internal resources as well as know-how. This poses a challenge to both IT and OT teams, which they encounter again and again in the digitization process. The result is difficult projects that drag on, incur high costs and make it difficult to calculate ROI.

With its low-code and drag-and-drop feature, the Asset Data Provider facilitates the development of complex integration projects. No extensive knowledge is required, so skill barriers, implementation time, and total cost of ownership (TCO) are significantly reduced.

The Asset Data Provider: Accelerate IIoT projects

With the Asset Data Provider, Balluff offers an integrative software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to accelerate digitization projects. The Asset Data Provider is a software solution for the collection, pre-processing and provision of data to IIoT applications generated, for example, by industrial assets such as machines, plants and sensors at the OT level.

Balluff goes one step further: in addition to data generation and transport with our products, we also enable data pre-processing at the edge level.

Asset Data Provider Cloud

Asset Data Provider Cloud offers a comprehensive selection of predefined modules for quick and easy creation of intelligent data flows using drag and drop functionality. Additional features such as one-click deployment, access rights, version control and a Credentials Vault extend functionality and enhance security.

Flow Studio:

• Module library:
  The Asset Data Provider library consists of the potential building blocks needed to build intelligent data flows. In addition to connectors, it also contains modules for analyses and data transformation and processing. It is continuously being expanded to generate the greatest possible customer benefit.

• Drag and drop
  The drag-and-drop function lets you select modules from the library and assemble them as you need them. This makes it easy for people without programming skills to create, test, and deploy data flows. It's easy to create your own data flows in minutes.

• Test data flows
  To test the functionality of data flows, you can use the so-called sandbox. Use this test environment to check the streams you have created. Alternatively, you can also validate them in a real environment.

• Flow templates
  Templates can save you a lot of time in your daily work. Simply save a created data flow as a template and simplify the future conceptual design of flows.

Control Center:

• Flow life-cycle management: Flow life-cycle management enables secure node deployment and simplifies one-click deployments and mass deployments of data flows. You save time and resources while achieving high security and efficiency in data management.

• Enterprise management: Efficiently manage access rights, perform version control, and securely store sensitive credentials in the Credentials Vault. This ensures privacy, security and transparency for your data flows.

The Asset Data Provider Edge

Runtime for data flows
The Asset Data Provider Edge is a lightweight and powerful application. It serves as a runtime for your data pipeline, which you install as a Docker container on the Linux operating system. The Asset Data Provider Edge processes data available directly from the data source and real-time streaming analysis of up to 100,000 messages.

Deploy anywhere
There are a few reasons why hybrid infrastructure, rather than a complete move to the cloud, makes sense for many organizations. Among them are networking costs, data storage and processing costs, latency and security. The Asset Data Provider is centrally managed and can be seamlessly installed anywhere to access and process your data in a distributed hybrid architecture:

IO-Link configuration
The Asset Data Provider enables manufacturer-independent and central commissioning, configuration, and parameterization of IO-Link masters and devices according to the IO-Link standard for sensors and actuators.

The Asset Data Provider at a glance

License the Asset Data Provider

Use cases: Put IIoT readiness into practice.

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