FairCom Corporation: The World’s First Converged IoT Hub

Today, it is a fact that most businesses handle a tremendous amount of data daily. However, companies need a more solid data strategy to collect, process, and analyze data. Without the right technology or technique, the businesses’ data could be hindering its BI, analytics, and innovation goals. This is also the single biggest challenge organizations face—getting access to data generated by machines (i.e., sensors and other connected devices)—in the modern IoT space. There is a gap between the operational engineers managing machines and the software engineers/data analysts who need their data. In a sense, it is a data integration problem. There is a great deal of data generated by machines, and it’s valuable. So, the question is how to get hands on that data and make it available to enterprise applications, developers, and data scientists. FairCom—the provider of the most customizable database engine on the market and the world’s first converged IIoT hub—is bridging this gap between operational engineers and data analysts. FairComhas a long history asa pioneer in the software industry. In addition to its ground-breaking IoT technology, it was the first company to offer a commercial package using b-tree algorithms on microcomputers in 1979.

The FairCom EDGE solution is explicitly designed to unlock machine data right at the edge—whether it’s the factory floor, a warehouse, a wind farm, or a retail store. The unique solution bridges this gap by communicating in both machine and software protocols. It combines an MQTT broker and OPC UA client for machine connectivity (OT) with a database and web server for REST and SQL software connectivity (IT). Moreover, it does so quickly and transparently as an all-in-one solution with no external dependencies. Users can simply install and start it on an edge device or gateway and manage it through a clean web UI. In addition, a ThingWorx connector enables FairCom EDGE to continuously synchronize the data produced by physical machines with digital twins in the cloud.

Simplifying the Integration of Edge Data

FairCom truly eats, sleeps, and breathes data at every point of its operation. The highly advanced FairCom database is embedded within countless applications across the world, often running in resource-constrained environments and in the absence of database administrators. “We saw a similar challenge in IoT – the handling of data produced outside the reach of IT. Whereas the edge used to be a desktop or server application, now it’s a machine or connected device. And it’s why we built FairCom EDGE, the world’s first converged Industrial IoT hub. To simplify the integration of edge data by making it accessible to enterprise applications out of the box – and to developers and data scientists as well,” explains Mike Bowers, Chief Architect, FairCom.

While edge data can be forwarded directly to cloud services such as AWS IoT Core or Azure IoT Hub, the best solution is to persist the data locally (at the edge) before forwarding it to the cloud. This removes the risk of data loss when sending data across slow Internet connections and to intermittent cloud services. Even if the Internet is down, FairCom EDGE will continue to collect and store machine data as it is produced. The result is that real-time dashboards and analytics can run reliably at the edge and be enriched by the cloud when it is available.

Based on the company’s findings, IoT, and Industrial IoT platforms, in particular, are pretty complex as per the additional number of components and third-party software to provide a complete solution. Moreover, they require separate databases forSQL-based access, MQTT brokers, web servers, connectors, and other add-ons for them to work effectively. FairCom’s team identified these challenges and introduced FairCom EDGE, which combines these services into one executable that is installed by simply unzipping and running. However, FairCom EDGE doesn’t only converge a database, an MQTT broker, and an web server, it automatically parses data, whether JSON or binary, transforms it, and stores it in relational tables to be queried via standard BI/reporting tools, machine learning, and custom applications/dashboards using SQL or HTTP/REST.

Integrated Database

FairCom EDGE is entirely self-contained and self-reliant. What makes the product stand out from the crowd is its fully integrated database. It is much easier to build an IoT hub or MQTT broker than to create a database. This is why other IoT solutions require a separate database. But, with FairCom EDGE, there is no need to purchase, install, administer, manage, and monitor a third-party database. The embedded FairCom database requires no installation and maintenance. Further, the performance of FairCom EDGE cannot be beaten precisely because it persists machine data to its internal database engine, not across the network to a remote database server. “FairCom EDGE is an all-in-one solution that includes all the core features needed to integrate IoT/Industrial IoT solutions. There is no need to purchase, install, and manage separate software for MQTT, REST, SQL, and JSON. But most importantly, all the data from MQTT, REST, SQL, and JSON automatically go into and out of the same database tables and this makes data integration easy,” points Bowers.

For about half a century, FairCom’s performance and reliability in resource-constrained environments running outside of IT have made it perfect for edge deployments. An instance that highlights the company’s value proposition is when the team assisted a global leader in digital transformation employing more than 2,000 employees. One of its current IoT projects, at the forefront of pushing the IoT envelope, involved wastewater treatment for a major North American city. By integrating Industrial IoT technology, the city can operate wastewater treatment systems more efficiently, taking a significant step in conserving water while at the same time improving waste removal and preventing flooding. The company accomplished this quickly by deploying FairCom EDGE to collect sensor data and persist it on the edge, thus enabling the creation of intelligent control systems and providing the capability to enhance existing control systems with IoT capabilities.

A High-Performance, Reliable Solution

FairCom laid its cornerstone in 1979 to advance database technology and expand its usage beyond the data center. Since opening its doors, the database engine in FairCom EDGE has been trusted by more than 40 percent of the Fortune 100 companies. In fact, FairCom DB is known as the developer’s database. Today, FairCom DB has clients in multiple languages and can be embedded and deployed as a server. FairCom EDGE is a major enhancement of FairCom DB for IoT and Industrial IoT use cases. “In the past, our customers needed a high-performance, reliable solution for embedded data access within mission-critical applications. Now, they need one for microservices, connected devices, and industrial gateways – and that’s precisely where we’re going, the application of an unmatched core database technology to next-generation use cases such as IoT/Industrial IoT, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and microservices,” adds Bowers.

Looking ahead, FairCom EDGE has an aggressive and exciting roadmap over the next few years. The team is currently testing support for Siemens S7 user-defined data types over MQTT to make it even easier for manufacturers to unlock machine data out-of-the-box with no code needed. Next, it’ll update the MQTT broker to support the MQTT 5 and Sparkplug protocols. “The other interesting area we’re looking at is allowing developers to use MQTT itself to asynchronously query and modify the machine data stored within FairCom EDGE. In addition to converging a database engine, MQTT broker, and REST server, we’re looking to directly integrate Python into FairCom EDGE to expand its transformation capabilities and for running artificial intelligence and machine learning on the edge.” Things, no pun intended, are going to get even more exciting in the edge space soon!” concludes Bowers.