Google Cloud is helping UK edge software provider IoTech provide smart and integrated edge-cloud offerings for building automation.

Targeting enterprise companies, the partnership should let industrial users such as manufacturing, building automation and smart energy companies deploy smart, no-code and integrated edge-cloud services at scale.

This expanded partnership will impact industrial IoT deployments which come with certain challenges including OT and IT integration.

The northbound communication protocol to Google Cloud is typically MQTT or Rest while the southbound communication protocols include Modbus, Bacnet, Ethernet/IP, S7 and OPC-UA. Other problems industrial users face include the ability to extract data from old and legacy IoT devices and the ability to control what data specifically are sent to Google Cloud, mainly for security, latency and/or cost reasons. Edge computing capabilities and features therefore play an increasingly important role in industrial IoT.

The partnership lets industrial users deploy a smart, no-code and integrated edge-cloud at scale. IoTech’s Edge Xpert typically resides on the edge gateway or server level while Edge XRT can reside on legacy or resource constrained hardware such as MCUs and PLCs, typically found at the far edge.

Both platforms come with more than twenty OT connectors including Modbus, Bacnet, Ethernet/IP, S7 and OPC-UA. The platforms also include an SDK making it easier to build new OT connectors, if required. Seamless data integration with Google Cloud is provided as standard.

“IoTech is excited to be a Google Cloud edge ISV partner,” said Keith Steele, CEO of IoTech Systems. “The integrated edge-cloud allows for fast deployments, significantly reducing the time to value. Adding an OT device is enabled through simple configuration and no coding skills are required.”

IoTech builds and deploys vendor-neutral software platforms and tools to support the rapid development, deployment and management of applications at the IoT edge helping drive IoT innovation, global market adoption, velocity and scale. The company’s products address the spectrum of secure hard and soft real-time edge computing needs, reducing time to market, development and system integration costs for its partners who are the supply chains to multiple vertical IoT market domains.