Cooperation between Moxa Europe and Robotron

Most industrial companies have the use of IIoT solutions on their agenda. Some face the challenge of needing to see the first results quickly and with as few resources of their own as possible in order to determine whether the creation of an IIoT infrastructure is even worthwhile. Others have already invested time and money and have initial results – but no scalable platform to be able to efficiently undertake the next roll-outs and further projects.

Moxa Europe and Robotron Datenbank-Software are addressing precisely these challenges. They have combined their activities in the field of Industrial IoT and, effective immediately, are preparing complete solutions that lead to quickly installed, easy-to-operate and broadly scalable IIoT platforms.

Moxa contributes the reliable industrial hardware with which the sensors, machines and other components are integrated. At the heart of this IIoT infrastructure are industrial-grade IIoT gateways and edge computers. For these components, Moxa also makes an operating system available with Moxa Industrial Linux. Major releases of this operating system will be provided with security updates over a period of ten years. This ensures a long service life and stability of the installed hardware – including the ever-increasing cyber-security requirements.

As a specialist for the collection and evaluation of large quantities of data, Robotron offers various software solutions and platforms for high-performance IIoT applications. For the area of industrial production, focus is on current edge and cloud technologies as well as artificial intelligence for intelligent process control and optimisation. These solutions can be adapted over a broad spectrum to the individual and widely varying requirements of the industrial users.

Together, Moxa and Robotron are focusing their collaboration on four application cases:

1. General IIoT platforms in demanding industries and applications, for which Moxa provides hardware components: Transportation (especially railway technology), oil & gas industry.
2. IIoT solutions for the energy sector – a particular strength of the partnership. The first projects have already been implemented here: using affordable IIoT hardware and innovative data analysis and visualisation, insights into the distribution network can be generated that were previously only possible with considerably more expensive traditional solutions.
3. Energy efficiency and management in industry. Here, the industrial experience of Moxa and the data analytics expertise from Robotron (based on, among other things, the robotron*IPEA platform) form an ideal combination.
4. Real-time applications based on Robotron's Realtime Computer Vision platform (RCV). Together with the hardware from Moxa's appropriately certified edge-computing technology, this platform is also suitable for use in demanding industrial applications (e.g., in industries such as oil & gas, mining / extraction technology, rail technology, etc).

With this well-prepared collaboration, both partners see great potential for offering their customers clear additional benefits as well as opportunities for opening new application fields. Hermann Berg, Head of Industrial IoT at Moxa Europe: "The collaboration with Robotron puts us in the position of also being able to very confidently offer complex IIoT projects with high requirements on software and cloud technology."

Those responsible at Moxa are certain they have found the right software partner with just the right solution portfolio. Hermann Berg: "I am impressed how well developed and stable the Robotron platform is and with how much attention to detail the pre-processing of the data on the gateway has been implemented."

From Robotron's perspective, the combination of hardware and software expertise for IIoT applications creates the ideal condition for being even more successful together.

Michael Baling, Head of Division Industry at Robotron, said: “With the broad industrial-grade and robust portfolio from Moxa, we have found a partner to whom we can simply leave discussions regarding topics such as environmental requirements, longevity, and hardware-based security. In the area of logistics as well, Moxa – together with the German distribution partner Sphinx Computer – has relieved us of all complexity, allowing us to concentrate fully on our core competencies of software and data analysis."