Global IoT leader Advantech Technology recently held the first Advantech IoT co-creation summit at Suzhou International Expo Center, and released the latest IoT platform architecture WISE-PaaS 3.0 during the period. At the same time, it released the IoT industry solution SRP (Solution Ready Package; SRP) with many co-creation partners at the summit, declaring the strategy and process of co-creation with partners. During the
event, Mr. Cai Qinan, general manager of Advantech Industrial Internet of Things Business Group, accepted an exclusive interview with IoT Media, revealing the specific implementation of Advantech Industrial 4.0/intelligent manufacturing application and development strategies and co-creation.
Advantech Industrial Internet of Things Business Group China General Manager Mr. Cai Qinan
IoT Media: Hello, Mr. Cai! I am very happy that you can accept an exclusive interview with IoT Media! First of all, let’s start with the current situation of the industry. Do you think the “killer” application of the Internet of Things has already or is about to appear? Is Industry 4.0 really coming?
Cai Qinan: IoT is a comprehensive technical architecture, it must be combined with the real industry to generate value. Its typical architecture is comprehensive perception, reliable transmission and intelligent analysis. Smart agriculture, smart cities, smart manufacturing... Many different types of IoT integrated physical industries are being implemented.
Advantech is very optimistic about intelligent manufacturing. Simply put, we have the following four dimensions of reasons:
First, from the policy perspective, the Chinese government has always been very inclined and supported the industrial Internet in recent years;
Second, the domestic manufacturing industry is facing huge pressure from the rise in labor costs, and changes in the industrial environment are forcing enterprises to upgrade automation;
Third, from the perspective of the company's customers, their demand for high quality as consumers is also increasing day by day. It is not difficult to find that food traceability, automobile component traceability and other projects related to product quality and traceability are increasing;
Fourth, the "intelligent manufacturing" technical solutions that our upstream companies can provide are relatively mature, and have made traditional producers and operators see what their development bottleneck is and how to use mature solutions to enhance the overall competitiveness of the smart manufacturing industry.
This time, "The Wolf is really here", and Industry 4.0 is on the way! Therefore, Advantech believes that the "killer" application of the Internet of Things will be implemented in the manufacturing industry. In the past 20 years, manufacturing has been an important pillar of the entire Chinese economy; now, our manufacturing industry is facing transformation and upgrading, and this historic upgrade cannot be completed without introducing the Internet of Things, so everyone is looking for solutions and the demand is urgent.
Industry 4.0 complements the development of the Internet of Things. It is a symbol of regional industrial competitiveness. From perceiving China to the current Internet of Things, I personally look forward to the future development of the industry.
IoT Media: If you analyze Industry 4.0 from the architecture of the Internet of Things, what are the shortcomings of it? What are the future efforts of domestic companies and our Advantech?
Cai Qinan: As for the Internet of Things itself, it has a clear hierarchical architecture. The perception layer is responsible for identifying and collecting information, and the network transmission layer is responsible for transmitting data to the cloud platform through networked devices. In the inner layer of the application layer, there are various complex operations, which require cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence analysis technology.
From the past to the present, China's sensor technology has been relatively backward, and the initiative is in the hands of European and American companies. This kind of hardware lags behind has its historical reasons, but the acceleration of globalization has allowed us to see development opportunities in the software field. For example, the current hot AI (artificial intelligence) technology in the industry can be said that before it matures, global companies, including our Chinese companies, have the possibility of success. If we can seize this opportunity, we may be able to achieve a historic catch-up.
Under the tide of the booming development of the Internet of Things, many businesses have invested in planning equipment networking and data collection, but how data can further generate value is still in the exploration stage.
Since launching WISE-PaaS in 2014, Advantech has developed from the initial Internet of Things software module on the local side to continue integration and strengthening its docking with open source communities. It has developed to have the ability to establish cloud platform operation services, and regards the commercial value that can be produced after data acquisition as the primary clear goal of its development. Industrial data-driven intelligent innovation has thus become the focus of overall evolution.
In the past, Advantech used to be functionally driven as its development direction, but later found that this would not work, so it changed to develop with a data-driven thinking as a whole.
, and WISE-PaaS has accumulated a lot of successful cases so far. Faced with the continuous emergence of innovative business formats and diversified needs in the market, Advantech's WISE-PaaS 3.0 provides four functional modules, including process visualization cloud configuration tools, artificial intelligence (AI) model training and deployment service architecture, device networking remote operation and maintenance service architecture, and microservices development architecture.
Advantech has been an intelligent hardware equipment company before, and the rise of AI technology is also a great development opportunity for us. In the future, we will launch some smart devices to solve customers' differentiation problems, but Advantech, as a solution provider, will not be involved in every specific industry field.
Based on the development strategy of complementary advantages, Advantech will adopt some external cooperation, such as combining GPU modules to increase the graphics computing capabilities of AI hosts. Therefore, Advantech maintains close cooperative relationships with international industry leaders such as Intel , NVIDIA .
IoT Media: From industrial computers to the current WISE-PaaS industrial IoT cloud platform, what important transformations has Advantech invested in the IoT industry?
Cai Qinan: Looking back on Advantech's transformation, we have summarized the following three changes:
First, in terms of product technology, Advantech has transformed from a simple hardware provider in the past to a current "hardware + software" comprehensive solution provider. In the past, most people would associate Advantech with industrial control machine or industrial computers when they mentioned it. But in fact, in the past decade, we have made relevant R&D reserves in the software field and launched WISE-PaaS in 2014. Its huge value is for Advantech itself, which is to add more new inspiration to the next generation of hardware product design.
Second, Advantech's organizational capabilities have undergone overall changes. In the past, our sales staff at Advantech only needed to understand their hardware product parameters and were really selling computers. However, with the changes in the industry situation in recent years, Advantech's sales team has learned to combine with application solutions since only understanding hardware, and is constantly developing new customers with application orientation.
Third, Advantech's cooperation partners have also undergone tremendous changes. In the so-called industrial control computer era, our long-term cooperation with Advantech was our global channel partners, and now our cooperative customers have added more industry integrators. These major changes above
are of turning point for Advantech. In the future, Advantech will also make great investments in the software field, making the added value of our hardware products more obvious.
IoT Media: The theme of this conference is "co-creation". How does Advantech's co-creation concept and model empower partners? Please talk about the specific implementation of co-creation in the intelligent manufacturing industry!
Cai Qinan: First of all, we need to explain why Advantech proposed "co-creation". The background is that Advantech found that many industry partners have invested in equipment data collection, hoping to import AI to promote the intelligence of equipment and process management. They actively look for methods and tools to extract the value of data, but industry partners usually retain their high-value industry expertise accumulated over the years. Advantech understands the pain points of upgrading that various industries need to break through, and then finds that through "co-creation", the two parties jointly design innovative industrial solutions based on the Internet of Things cloud platform data-driven, which can effectively combine each other's expertise and create a win-win situation.
Through partners' professional knowledge in the industry, and with Advantech's on-site data collection, networking and cloud data processing and application, it forms a perfect solution for the integration of OT and IT, completing data collection, management, and analysis, showing the last mile of data driving.
Therefore, since this year, Advantech has launched co-creation cooperation in various fields and has cultivated system integrator (DFSI; Domain-Focused Solution Integrator), a recently jointly established a water treatment system integrator with Chuanyuan (China) Machinery and a joint venture with Taiwan Yongjin Machinery to establish a CNC equipment remote operation service provider. All of these are Advantech's co-creation model, working with partners to guide the digital transformation of the industry and achieve a new situation of win-win results in the Internet of Things industry.
Advantech's current co-creation model can be divided into two types:
One is to create products and solutions with our partners, "customer's industry experience + Advantech's software and hardware capabilities" can form an SRP (Solution-Ready Packages) solution;
The other is co-creation at the market level, which includes the establishment of a joint venture company. Advantech and its partners jointly develop a target market, and only holds a smaller shareholding in the joint venture company and does not control shares.
IoT Media: We are all looking forward to the "cross-strait" enterprises working together to enhance their position in the international intelligent manufacturing value chain. Please look forward to the future development prospects of Industrial 4.0/intelligent manufacturing applications!
Cai Qinan: "cross-strait" enterprises have had a clear division of labor in the past 20 years, including the division of labor in industrial focus and technological research and development. In this regard, Taiwan has world-class hardware leading companies, which are good at manufacturing, so Taiwan's electronics industry is in a leading position in the world; while mainland China has Internet leaders like BAT, and process industries such as automobile manufacturing with extremely high development level and market influence.
Therefore, future industrial development requires complementary development based on the division of labor of traditional enterprises. Whether in Taiwan or the mainland, leading enterprises in the industry have mastered development experience and should feed back and drive the development of the entire Chinese regional market with a global concept. In this way, cross-strait enterprises and industries can achieve regional development under the virtuous cycle of focus and complementarity.
2018 Advantech IoT Co-creation Summit has come to an end successfully. This year, more than 5,000 partners have witnessed the release of Advantech’s latest IoT platform architecture WISE-PaaS 3.0 and 34 sets of SRPs of SRPs in co-creation IoT industry solutions.
At the event, Advantech also signed with several SRP operators. As the "promoter of the smart earth", Advantech will provide more powerful software and hardware integration solutions in emerging industries such as the Industrial Internet of Things, and provide customers with convenient localized response with strong technical strength and marketing network. Together, Advantech and you will accelerate the implementation of IoT applications.
