Intelligent installations: Qualcomm connectivity services let OEMs build out smarter machines
Frank O Smith, senior contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 5/12/2008 9:01:00 AM
OEMs for industrial and other type machines are beginning to appreciate the opportunity to differentiate their offerings in the market by embedding intelligence in their products, as well as the means to communicate over vast distances to enable greater product uptime and service.Companies like Gardner Denver, John Deere, and ABB Power are turning to Qualcomm for assistance in providing the wired and wireless network technology and intelligence to connect equipment anywhere in the world.
“Tolerance is decreasing for transmission downtime in the electric power generation industry,” says Bart Gaskey, marketing manager voltage services for ABB Power Technologies Group. “The industry is looking to be smarter and do more with the equipment they have.
”Historically, geographically dispersed high-voltage transformers and circuit breakers installed across extensive power grids have been capable of providing notification of a problem only when there is a hard stop. The industry would like [to see] notification of a problem before that happens so pre-emptive action can be taken," Gaskey continues.
Although sensing technology for monitoring has been around for awhile, ABB Power turned to Qualcomm Global Smart Services for “wireless networking and data acquisition technology so we can network, transfer, and store the data through the Web,” Gaskey says.
ABB showcased its new Asset Insight System—which leverages Qualcomm Global Smart Services—at an IEEE Association transmission show in Chicago in April. Initially offered with newly installed ABB equipment, the service will be made available from ABB for retrofit across multiple brands.
Asset Insight System monitor parameters in real time and initiates notification when troublesome trends emerge.
“The sensing technology is ABB’s, but we’re pumping the data up through the Qualcomm network into Qualcomm servers where it can be dispatched and displayed on dashboards to alert operations when there’s a problem, and before there’s a hard stop," says Gaskey. "[With Qualcomm,] we're trying to bring smart services to the entire power transmission and distribution industry."
ABB Power sought out Qualcomm based on sister division ABB Robotics’ successful initiatives with the vendor. Because power distribution is highly capital-intensive, “It makes a lot of sense to extend service as efficiently as possible,” Gaskey asserts.
According to Glen Allmendinger, president of San Francisco-based Harbor Research, “Qualcomm is one of the largest service delivery organizations on the planet. What they’re saying is, ‘We’ll help you build the application,' but you also can rent the network infrastructure to customers. This is something that Qualcomm excels at. There aren’t many others who’ve knitted it all together on [this scale]. In this emerging market space, they’re pretty unique in what they’ve done.”
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