Developer of analytics software SkyFoundry teamed on Monday with ioTium, a vendor of low cost, scalable and extensible network infrastructure for IoT applications for its SkyFoundry’s SkySpark Analytics software, which has been certified to run on ioTium’s network infrastructure.
SkySpark allows domain experts to capture their knowledge in “rules” that automatically run against collected data. Employing semantic tagging, pattern recognition, functional rules processing and other techniques, SkySpark’s analytics engine provides the ability to automatically identify issues worthy of attention, leading to the capability to informing users of what they need to know about the performance of their systems.
SkySpark works with data of all types — live links to automation systems and smart meters, connections to SQL databases, static CSV files, or web service feeds. SkySpark also makes it easy to centralize data for analysis.
The initial step is to apply SkySpark is to aggregate and organize data. SkySpark is built with a customized database called Folio that manages real-time and time-series data. It also imports data from Excel, CSV, relational databases, and connect to real time data via standard protocols including BACnet IP, oBIX, Modbus TCP, Haystack and Sedona.
Instead of relying on conventional database schemas, meaning and relationships – “semantics” – is accomplished using “tags”. Tags are added to data items as needed to convey definitions and associations. For example, an air handler might have tags that define its location (site, building, floor), fact that it is an electric load, manufacturer, capacity, schedule, associated control parameters, etc. Records can have as many tags as needed and new tags can be added ad hoc whenever needed. Tags provide the hooks that the analytics engine uses to correlate and analyze the data.
Analysis is accomplished with a computation engine known as Axon that offers a comprehensive set of functions for querying, transforming, and analyzing data. The system implementer writes rules using the Axon language, which are then processed by the Axon engine. Define an issue once, save it, and activate it – SkySpark will find it; create new rules based on new observations or ideas at anytime without affecting underlying systems; and rules can be combined and linked together, while building a library of rules that capture the essential items that matter to the application.
When Axon rules “hit” or “trigger” they create a spark, which can be reviewed and analyzed using one of the many built-in web apps. Or Sparks may be configured to generate notifications via email, social networking apps, or third party applications.
“The explosion in IoT connected devices creates tremendous opportunities to generate value from the device data,” said John Petze, SkyFoundry’s principal. “ Secure communication is an essential element and the ioTium solution provides customers with an entirely new approach to implement a secure communications infrastructure. We are excited to have SkySpark validated to run on the ioTium infrastructure.”
“We are pleased to announce SkySpark running seamlessly and securely on ioTium’s secure network infrastructure. This significantly simplifies secure remote access to SkySpark from any cloud while significantly reducing remote access costs and minimizing truck rolls,” said Ron Victor, CEO at ioTium.
