CHEP selects Omnitrol Networks' platform to deliver technology for the development of a track-and-traceability solution

CHEP is a global leader in managed, returnable, and reusable packaging solutions, serving many of the world's largest companies in sectors such as consumer goods, fresh produce, beverage, and automotive. CHEP’s service is environmentally sustainable and increases efficiency for customers while reducing operating risks and product damage.

This represents one of the most important scale deployments of RFID technology. We are really happy to help CHEP in their endeavour to provide visibility to their large network around the world. This is also a great endorsement for our work to deliver a real-time collaborative and operational intelligent supply-chain network. Read the news release here.

Omnitrol Networks Closes Funding Round to Meet Accelerating Demand

Omnitrol Networks announced today that it has closed a round of financing with Javelin Venture Partners and several existing investors. A select group of new strategic individual investors also participated in the round, including Puneet Arora, the former CTO of TIBCO Software.

The financing round brings Omnitrol Networks' total investment since inception to approximately $15 million. The company has also been previously backed by Westlake International Group and individual founders. The capital will be used to expand sales and marketing, and help accelerate key initiatives in response to sustained industry growth.

Read the complete news release.

NTT Multimedia Deploys Automated Mobile Asset Tracking from Omnitrol Networks

A little bit of background about this division:
NTT Multimedia Communications Laboratories, Inc (NTT MCL) was founded as a division of NTT America in 1996, and incorporated in 1998 by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT). NTT is a leading global provider of telecommunications services to pursue the commercialization of advanced technologies that would leverage NTT’s expertise in multimedia communications. Since then, NTT MCL has evolved into being the only overseas advanced research and development arm of NTT Communications.

After evaluating available solutions, NTT MCL selected the OMNITROL Asset Tracking solution utilizing RFID sensor technologies from Impinj and Omni-ID. The appliance-based OMNITROL Asset Tracking solution used Impinj Speedway Revolution RFID readers with circularly polarized antennas deployed at the facility entrance/exits. The RFID readers are managed directly by the OMNITROL appliance running the OMNITROL Asset Visibility Edgelet, which implements sophisticated status, presence, identification, and directionality algorithms to determine what asset is moving where, with a very high degree of reliability.

Complete press release here.

EMC to acquire data warehouse vendor Greenplum

Another sign that Big Data is top of mind for IT vendors. The acquisition is showing the importance of getting business value out of the data generated by applications (business or monitoring), sensors, users and customers. Read the article here. There's something very interesting about the combination of data analytics and cloud/virtualization. This is what Omnitrol has delivered in our solutions: analytics-as-a-service.

SAP acquires Sybase for $5.8 billion

This acquisition has the potential to upend the software industry in a significant way. Sybase doesn't have the greatest database market share but its mobility software will allow SAP to connect its enterprise software (including analytics) to billions of devices. Few companies have successfully made key transitions in their business. SAP is in the middle of one them, it looks like they are taking it very seriously.

Facebook has the world's largest Hadoop cluster

I like it when different themes are beginning to converge. Earlier this year, I wrote the importance of mining enterprise data. But how do you organize, index, and search a large amount of mostly unstructured data (ie emails, blogs, documents, web pages, logs, videos)? Here comes Hadoop. This is a very good video that explains Hadoop as a new data platform.



Another of my key themes is social networking and Facebook just released data about their Hadoop storage cluster. 21 PB of data, that's 1 million gigabytes and you can bet it will double next year or so. That's a lot of data to mine to get value for advertisers.

Omnitrol Networks Takes Best-in-Class Ranking from RFID.net

RFID.net has awarded Omnitrol Networks a best-in-class ranking among intelligent sensor network software and appliance makers.

"Our team of experts found that the Omnitrol Networks solution not only outperformed and out-scaled competitive offerings, but also saved tens of thousands of dollars in hidden costs," wrote Louis Sirico, President of RFID.net.

Here are some of the key differentiators that RFID.net identified:

• device-agnostic support for RFID readers, printers and encoders, Real-Time Location Services (RTLS), PLC controls, digital and analog sensors, and metering and operator feedback devices;
  
• integration with commercial databases, ERP and other back-ends;
  
• a secure distributed smart-agent software framework;
  
• a built-in service creation and sensor emulation environment for rapid delivery of business intelligent applications.

Read more here.

How many Java developers are there?

Over 9M according to this blog post. I first looked at Java back in 1996. An engineer at Alcatel brought the first copy of "Java in a Nutshell" and said: "This is the future".

The author of the blog says that at the time of Java's open sourcing in 2007, there were 6 million Java developers and the number of Java developers had been rising at an average of 0.75 million per year during the previous two years. After Java was open sourced, that number shot up to 1 million per year.

Why the success?
From a technical point of view, "Write Once, Run Anywhere" and a solid set of APIs would do the trick.
From a business point of view, Free and a "transparent" Java Community Process would work, but a solid evangelist like Sun Microsystems is also needed.

As the back-end is moving to the cloud and the front-end is moving to mobile devices, Google and Apple are in control of the user experience. Java is still very relevant (through Android for the front-end).

Big Data (aka Analytics)

There was a very interesting article from Dan Kusnetzky in ZDNET about Big Data. Telco has always been at the forefront of producing, processing, and analyzing large amount data. What I'm witnessing today is another order of magnitude of data volume. When items such as razor blades, racks of fresh produce, jeans, and pallets are "sending" updates about their locations, status, and temperature through a network of automated sensors, we are talking "big data". That data tells a lot about habits and trends at a micro (privacy) and macro (economy) scale.

If you were to send all this raw data right to a central server, you would make Big Data simply Huge Data, and immediately lose the value of real-time automated data. We believe a large amount of information generated at the Edge should be used at the Edge. Only a fraction of that data should make it to a central server and become Big Data.

When a forklift picks up a pallet full of fresh berries from a loading dock, then drives through a multitude of portals equipped with sensors to finally put away the fruits in a cold room, thousands of records have been created. They include very important real-time information such as: "Is this the right truck and loading dock?", "Is this the right pallet?", "Are these the right berries?", "How many workers are around the forklift while it is backing out?", "Are all the pallets in the right cold room?". This data is critical during the actual movement of the assets but unless exception occurs, we are only interested in a small subset for the long term.

Hobart Machined Products Deploys Omnitrol Real-Time Supplier Collaboration Solution

Hobart Machined Products is a manufacturer of precision parts for the aerospace, medical, automotive, and electronic industries. Over the past 32 years, Hobart has earned a global reputation for consistent high-performance ratings and customer service excellence in complex mechanical and airframe assembly design, engineering, and precision machining.

Aerospace and other manufacturing industries have accelerated outsourcing of manufacturing operations to increase efficiencies and reduce costs. However, moving some of the operations outside of the physical four walls of the factory has created “dark areas” in the manufacturing visibility process. As a supplier to Boeing, one of the world’s largest manufacturers, Hobart was looking for ways to address this problem and become a better supplier. It wanted to provide real-time production visibility to its customers to alleviate any fears of missing mission-critical deadlines.

The Omnitrol solution has simplified the process of entering and tracking customer orders through a web portal that can be securely accessed anytime from anywhere. By choosing an integrated solution from a single vendor, Hobart benefits from a seamlessly integrated view, from customer orders through to their inventory system, to generate an extremely accurate production forecast with customer feedback capability. Based on what is available or expected to arrive in the warehouse, the system gives Hobart's employees a detailed view of what they will be able to kit, assemble, and produce now and in the future.

You can read the news release here.

Disruption at work: Apple's iPad

Apple has done it again. The Cupertino guys have, one more time, dramatically changed how people consume digital content with their new iPad device. This is on the same scale as the iPod and iPhone introduction. Digital content streaming is going to explode with the adoption of the iPad. The size, the weight, the resolution and the price make it the perfect device to use in the house. I don't like to look too far back, but Apple is superbly executing on their strategy as discussed in an early 2006 post. So who should be concerned with the new iPad?

• Amazon. It's going to take a lot of work for the Kindle to get any significant traction unless there is a big change in design and business model.
  


• Carriers. AT&T gets a 3GSM model to increase its subscriber base in an environment where ARPU is declining. Verizon and Sprint must be worried and so should be other carriers worldwide.
  


• Print Media. It's going to be very interesting to watch how media companies such as newspapers are going to react to the new device. Why do you want to pay for print newspapers/magazines ever again? I'd better monitor newspapers sales and distribution from now on.
  


• Device manufacturers (Nokia, RIM, Samsung, LG). Apple is all over the house now, they have so many touch points with the consumer that the barriers to entry will be too high for you and you may become irrelevant quickly.
  


• Google. This is a double-edged sword. Apple was first to market but a lot of the device manufacturers may flock to Google to adopt Android. This looks very much like the open vs closed war that we saw before.

All these companies are vying for a dominant position around the network triangle. Apple and Google are appearing as the leaders to control the overall user experience.