Yokogawa has acquired a modest $900,000 stake in Silicon Valley-based FogHorn systems, a ‘fog computing’ startup. Yokogawa aims to foster the development of fog computing technology and to expand its own range of solutions. So what is fog computing? According to the release, the ‘huge number of devices’ operating in the cloud and over the internet of things are creating network congestion and data processing delays. Fog computing solves this problem moving computing to the ‘edge’ of the network and lowering bandwidth requirements through a ‘fog’ of distributed computing layer between the cloud and devices in the field. Suggested use cases include mitigating oilfield electric submersible pump failure through analytics ‘at the edge.’
Led by March Capital and GE Ventures, FogHorn has raised $12 million in from Yokogawa, Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, Darling Ventures and other investors. Yokogawa is to implement the new technology leveraging its process co-innovation concept for automation, adding its own measurement, control and information technologies to the mix.
FogHorn recently rolled out its new Lightning software platform for real-time analytics applications running on ultra-small footprint edge devices. Lightning allows application developers, systems integrators and production engineers to build ‘edge analytics’ solutions for industrial operations and IIoT use cases. Lightning ingests high-speed data via OPC-UA, MQTT, Modbus and other protocols and includes ‘VEL,’ a real-time streaming analytics engine, along with connectors to data stores such as Apache Hadoop, Kafka, Microsoft Azure, Cloud Foundry RIAK and more. More from FogHorn.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2016 Issue # 7.
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