RTI announces record growth & IIoT market traction

In addition to expanding within its existing customer projects, such as those at GE Healthcare, Audi, Siemens Wind Power and Raytheon, RTI also on-boarded more than 140 new projects in the last year, reaching 1,000 design wins as of Q4 2016. While RTI is an established leader across the IIoT, the company delivered especially strong traction in the transportation, energy and medical markets. RTI is also a key leader in industry consortia defining the market, such as the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the OpenFog Consortium. 

Transportation: Enabling the Rise of Autonomy

According to IHS Automotive, autonomous car sales will hit 21 million by 2035. RTI is a key player in this exploding autonomous car (carbot) market. RTI now has more than 10 autonomous car customers who are beyond the research stage and entering final proof-of-concept or full production-track status. Most production vehicle programs are major multi-billion-dollar investments. RTI's involvement spans the exciting range of vehicles including major-brand passenger cars, campus vehicles, trucks and electric-vehicle startups, as well as futuristic systems, such as flying cars and hyperloop.

RTI also experienced strong growth in more traditional transportation markets such as rail, avionics and ship systems.

Energy: Increasing Practical Use of Renewables

RTI is a key leader in the transition to green energy, now with production programs in major hydro and wind generators. RTI's software powers the massive 6.8 GW Grand Coulee Dam, North America's largest power plant of any type. After two years of flawless operation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is deploying the architecture across its entire hydropower portfolio. The system is already running in three major dams in Georgia, and will expand to 20 more dams in 2017. Siemens Wind Power uses RTI software in its most advanced product lines, now also in production.

RTI is also a leader in integrating renewables into the power grid. RTI worked with the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) to develop the Open Field Message Bus (OpenFMB) architecture. OpenFMB will allow for more efficient use of solar and wind energy in the nation's power grids. In 2016, OpenFMB was also ratified by the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB). Additionally, RTI's software powers pilots at Duke Energy's Mt. Holly microgrid testbed, the Oak Ridge National Lab's AIME project and several others.

RTI also provides significant value in Oil & Gas. In the "upstream" market, RTI's software automates drilling, preventing environmental damage while lowering costs. In the "downstream" market, RTI joined the new Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF) consortium, a new standards organization founded by Exxon Mobile to bring IIoT architectures to process control and refining.

Medical: Improving Care with Connected, Intelligent Devices

Today's medical devices are independent boxes; they don't even know if they are connected to the same patient. With RTI's help, tomorrow's medical devices will work both together and with intelligent software to greatly improve 24/7 medical care. In 2016, GE Healthcare became RTI's single largest project. GE's new RTI-powered design will connect more than 300 types of hospital devices.

RTI has many other medical applications including imaging CT and ultrasound, emergency medical systems, and large treatment systems, such as Proton Beam Radiation Therapy (PBRT).

Consortia: Defining the Industry

RTI is active in 15 industry consortia, ranging from narrow industry verticals, such as the SGIP and OPAF, to extremely broad horizontal efforts, such as the IIC and OpenFog. 

RTI is a clear leader at the IIC, the world's largest IoT consortium. RTI's CEO is on the Steering Committee and chairs its Testbed Subcommittee. RTI also co-chairs four efforts: Connectivity, Security, Ecosystem and the Distributed Data Interoperability Management. RTI's Brett Murphy was awarded the IIC's highest individual honor in Q4 for his work with the five testbeds that RTI leads, in power, medical systems, transportation, security and edge intelligence. RTI helped author and publish the IIC's key guidance documents: the Industrial Internet Security Framework (IISF), the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) and the Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework (IICF). These works establish a common technology for the Industrial Internet.

RTI is also a leader at the OpenFog consortium. RTI co-chairs the Infrastructure Architecture Committee and sits on the Keynote Committee for the Fog World Congress.

A Turning Point

"This last year has been a real turning point for the Industrial IoT," said Stan Schneider, CEO at RTI. "The visions of the past are turning into reality. RTI has seen unprecedented growth in projects, customers and revenues. Even more exciting, the market is still young with only a few IIoT projects in production today. As more deploy, both individual projects and the entire market will expand tremendously. We live on the brink of an innovative new world of intelligent, connected systems. These are exciting times, captured by our new catchphrase: 'RTI lives at the intersection of functional artificial intelligence and pervasive networking.' These are the defining technology trends for the next decades. It's truly an honor to be trusted by so many billion-dollar programs and futuristic systems."

Learn More

To help the industry understand the new technologies, RTI recently launched a "Getting Started" program. This program is a web and email-based offering that provides the hands-on guidance required to implement RTI Connext DDS™ into robust IIoT systems. The Getting Started program includes step-by-step instructions and a series of tutorial videos, simplifying the process of understanding the IIoT and deploying RTI's product suite.