Overview

Enterprise operations have become more complex. Businesses and government agencies deploy an increasing number of diverse devices, systems, and networks to satisfy requirements for more sophisticated and detailed real-time information from facilities, infrastructure, and remote locations.

In fact, many critical enterprise functions require data from and connectivity with these diverse devices, systems, and networks. Such deployments may include sensors, wireless sensor networks, RFID systems, video devices and systems, access control systems, metering and measurement devices, actuators, and databases and file repositories, just to name a few.

More specifically, in safety and security activities, these devices and systems may include video cameras and systems, access control systems, motion sensors, threat detection sensors, and notification systems, among other assets. In the building management arena, these devices and systems may include access control systems, fire alarm systems, HVAC systems, meters, employee databases, and other assets. For energy and utility management applications, these devices and systems may include smart meters, line monitoring devices, transformer monitoring devices, substation security devices, substation automation devices, SCADA systems, and other assets. In asset tracking scenarios, the devices and systems might include RFID systems, video cameras, inventory databases, and other devices and systems.

Regardless of the application, these devices, systems, and networks often communicate in proprietary protocols over separate network infrastructures, which create walls between data, events and control functions. This limits the usefulness of the devices and systems and removes the opportunity for dynamic monitoring, control, and automation solutions. In order to unlock the true potential of these data, enterprises must overcome the cost and capacity challenges involved with converging devices, systems, and networks.

From a cost perspective, the integration and normalization of data, events, and control functions from diverse sources often requires a great deal of development, testing, and deployment time for customized software code and device-specific middleware components. Because of the time involved, some enterprises skip this task altogether, leading to underutilized investments. As a result, critical devices and systems are stranded, providing little value to the enterprise. The end results are wasted time and investments.

From a capacity perspective, the proliferation of these devices, systems, and networks can overwhelm the bandwidth of networks, especially wireless networks. In addition, the volume of data received without prior filtering and event processing could overwhelm enterprise end-users. A lack of robust capacity management can lead to inefficient networks and overwhelmed personnel.

Fortunately, Augusta Systems EdgeFrontier products help enterprises to overcome these challenges by enabling rapid creation of open, interoperable solutions, featuring distributed processing, control, and automation throughout the network infrastructure. By providing configurable technology platforms for building and managing intelligent convergence solutions, Augusta Systems allows enterprises to unlock new features, decrease solution development costs, improve operational efficiencies, and increase the return on investment for new and legacy devices, systems, and networks.

• Integration
• Protocol/format encoding and decoding
• Complex event processing
• Notifications and alerts
• Event and policy-based actions
• Data correlation and fusion
• Bi-directional communications (for monitoring, control, and automation)

Showcase deployments of the technologies include safety and security, energy and utilities, asset tracking, and other business functions.