Amazon today announced AWS IoT SiteWise, its managed monitoring service for industrial customers, is now generally available two years after its unveiling at AWS re:Invent 2018. SiteWise is live for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers as of this week in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland) regions, with additional server regions to follow in the coming months.
Manufacturers, energy utilities, and food processors often struggle to collect, process, and analyze data from their hundreds to thousands of internet of things (IoT) sensors. Extracting data across different locations is time-consuming and expensive, because this data is typically stored in local, specialized servers that lack a common data format. Even with a data-collection pipeline in place, information like equipment type, facility location, and relationships with other equipment must be annotated manually; customers have to write custom apps to calculate and compare performance metrics across facilities to derive insights.
SiteWise automates data ingestion from the plant floor, structuring and labeling the data and generating real-time metrics to inform managerial decisions. In SiteWise, customers begin by modeling their industrial equipment, processes, and facilities by adding context to the collected data. They then define common industrial performance metrics (e.g., overall equipment effectiveness and uptime) using SiteWise’s built-in library of mathematical functions. Once a customer’s environment is modeled and their data processed in AWS, the service automatically computes the metrics at an interval defined by the customer. Uploaded data and metrics are sent to a fully managed time-series database designed to store and retrieve time-stamped data with low latency.
From within the SiteWise console, customers can create custom web apps without coding to visualize KPIs across end-user devices. In addition to using software running on an edge device, SiteWise provides interfaces for collecting data from modern industrial apps through MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) messages or its APIs.
Amazon says that customers like Volkswagen Group are using SiteWise to collect manufacturing shop floor data into the cloud, model and organize those different machine assets within its plants, and visualize operational data from its cylinder production line in a web app. Another customer — Bayer — has deployed SiteWise across nine corn production plants in North America, collecting data from the plant floor and then measuring and analyzing the overall equipment effectiveness of its machinery to identify production inefficiencies. Bayer claims that SiteWise enabled it to onboard a crop site in less than a few hours versus several weeks.
Amazon maintains pole position in the IoT segment, which was estimated to be worth $212 billion by the end of 2019. According to a survey conducted by the Eclipse Foundation in 2018, AWS was by far the most popular cloud platform for IoT developers, growing in popularity by 21% from 2017 to a 51.8% share, compared with Azure’s 31.21% share (up from 17% in 2017). Amazon CTO Werner Vogels told VentureBeat in a recent interview that AWS customers deploy upwards of hundreds of thousands of sensors.