Iconics have been Dataworks strategic partner for over 10 years, providing us with the tools to create sophisticated applications to visualize , analyse and collect data from multiple data source types and delivering these applications securely to our customers on any device. Iconics as a company are at the heart of the IoT revolution. The release of their IoTWorX™ Remote Cloud Monitoring and Analytics Solution, will see their vision, of securely accessing data from any device in any location and delivering that data to visualisation and analysis applications via the cloud, become a reality.
Iconics products strength has been its ability to connect to a multitude of devices via standard protocols such as OPC, OPC-UA, BACnet and SNMP and allowing the data from these devices to drive feature rich applications. Traditionally these devices were interfaced to a plant or building network with the Iconics client applications deployed on the same network and accessed via the local intranet. Organisations with VPNs could have more sophisticated setups where data from multiple sites could be accessed by any client on the VLAN using the same Iconics client application deployed on their network. The IoT challenge is to have these industrial and building management devices securely connected to the internet so that applications, that feed off their data, can be securely accessed from anywhere on any device without the need for VPN type infrastructure. This is where the IoTWorX™ comes in.
To understand what the IoTWorX™ does we must first look at the concept of the IoT Gateway. An IoT Gateway is a physical bridge between on premise or ‘edge’ devices and the cloud. IoT gateways connected to a plant network for example allow all devices such as PLC’s and building controllers, interfaced to the plant network, to securely expose their data to the cloud. These gateways facilitate the development of secure, sophisticated and scalable software systems to analyse , visualise and control the operation of your enterprise. IoT gateways can be implemented using standard servers or can take the form of embedded systems, running on low cost microprocessors and performing a dedicated function. IoTWorX™ is the software that runs on these gateways.
