Digital age: Sun champions open standards to usher in new era in manufacturing
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/4/2008 12:55:00 PM
Sun Microsystems joins the MTConnect Technical Advisory Group (MTAG) to further define the open communication protocol standard it helped create for the manufacturing technology industry a year ago.
MTConnect is an open manufacturing technology standard that uses Internet communications technologies as its basis to allow manufacturing technology vendors and customers to safely and easily communicate.
"Sun Microsystems has a long history of working with the industry and academia to create and promote open technology standards that drive genuine innovation,” says Dave Edstrom, chief technologist of the Americas Software Practice for Sun Microsystems. “Open source and open standards are the keys to unlocking manufacturing innovation and efficiency around the world, particularly in growing emerging markets."
A typical manufacturing facility includes hundreds of machines and autonomous systems that must operate together. While each of these machines and systems accumulates information on its operation, this data cannot usually be shared, which makes it difficult to track machine efficiency, process flow, energy usage, tool path validation, and other metrics. As a result, manufacturers are challenged to coordinate and optimize machines and systems to ensure that these individual components and the factory as a whole are operating at acceptable levels.
MTConnect is an essential first step to connect these production islands and will open up new markets and opportunities for the manufacturing technology industry. Bringing unprecedented interoperability from design studio to shop floor, MTConnect enables third-party solution providers to develop software and hardware that make the entire manufacturing enterprise much more productive.
As a leader in creating open standards for the IT industry, Sun is in a strong position to help the manufacturing industry create a common, open standard. The Solaris Operating System, Java technology, the Sun Java Real-Time System, Sun SPOT, Sun xVM software and MySQL software are among the innovative technologies that enable MTConnect to deliver complete and open interoperability on the manufacturing floor, connecting to the enterprise to technology manufacturing partners in ways that were previously impossible.
Sun’s long history of innovation in CAD/CAM, HPC, grid computing, simulation, real-time and modeling technology serves as a strong platform for MTConnect. Technology companies could have immediate access to Sun computing resources via the Network.com Software Catalogue platform, allowing them to easily build, test, and deploy MTConnect enabled applications on-demand over the Internet.
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