Accelerating the adoption of Industrial IoT systems requires more than just great hardware and software at the edge – it requires financial capital alongside intellectual capital to evolve and grow. This week, one of the members of the Linux EdgeX Foundry community announced they secured $2.5M in seed funding to expand existing R&D activities, while also enhancing support for its partner ecosystem and local presence.
Keith Steele, founder and CEO at IOTech, and a pioneer in the world of connected things, brought together Dell (News - Alert) Technologies Capital and Innovate UK to further their product offering, which includes secure hard and soft real-time edge computing technology across multiple vertical IIoT market domains.
Edge computing is widely viewed as having a pivotal strategic role in the $195 billion Industrial IoT market, according to MarketsandMarkets research report “Industrial IoT Market by Device & Technology, Software, Vertical and Geography – Global Forecast to 2022.”
This industry research firm and others are forecasting the IIoT market will grow at a CGR of nearly 8% between 2016 and 2022.
The company is leveraging an open source strategy based on the Linux Foundation’s (News - Alert) EdgeX Foundry project to accelerate growth of a global partner ecosystem and dramatically increase deployment velocity of IoT systems by reducing custom systems integration.
The EdgeX Foundry project is aligned around the simplification and standardization of the foundation for edge computing architectures in the IoT market – and has gained significant market traction since its launch 12 months ago.
IOTech’s first offer – Edge Xpert – supports the rapidly growing global EdgeX Foundry developer community and partner ecosystem by providing a vendor-neutral fully commercialized version of the EdgeX code base.
This licensed offering will be available on multiple hardware and OS combinations with regular software upgrades and various support and maintenance options. Complementary professional service offerings will include training, POC support, custom product extensions and third party product integrations.
“Dell Technologies Capital’s investment, domain expertise and industry relationships will help IOTech continue to grow its business and drive IoT innovation by bringing more open and secure IIoT solutions to customers worldwide,” said Gregg Adkin, Managing Director, Dell Technologies Capital.
“We support IOTech’s vendor-neutral commercialization of the EdgeX Foundry code base.” said Jason Shepherd, IoT CTO, Dell Technologies. “With Edge Xpert end users can opt to take advantage of the growing ecosystem without having to support the baseline open source framework themselves. This allows them to focus their investments in preferred areas of differentiation. Further, Edge XRT is a game changer for enabling open, real-time solutions.”
Newcastle-based IOTech builds and deploys open and secure software edge platforms for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), leveraging an open source execution strategy.