Honeywell’s Inspire ecosystem brings together vendors, manufacturers and experts to develop solutions for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
Honeywell and Dover Energy Automation have announced a collaboration as part of Honeywell’s Inspire ecosystem. The program aims to build an IIoT ecosystem to help industrial customers improve the safety, efficiency and reliability of their operations.
The program is part of a wider initiative backing manufacturers as they leverage IIoT across a single plant or several plants. The goal is for the IIoT community to develop an infrastructure that gives customers a secure way to capture and aggregate data, apply complex analytics and reference the results with the vast knowledge gathered by an ecosystem of equipment vendors and process licensors.
Andrew Hird, vice president and general manager of Honeywell Process Solutions’ Digital Transformation business, welcomed the move. “It is clear that a robust ecosystem is key to successfully implementing an effective IIoT solution for manufacturers,” he said.
Read more: Honeywell launches Industrial IoT business unit
Honeywell’s Inspire ecosystem offers deep domain knowledge
“The need for deep domain knowledge and experience across a range of applications to quickly and fully evaluate a plant’s needs cannot be overstated. Dover’s expertise in equipment condition monitoring and asset integrity management is superior and makes it a powerful collaborator to provide expertise for our customers.”
Currently, Dover Energy Automation supplies products, productivity tools and automation software for the energy sector, enabling oil and gas operators to optimize performance and improve productivity.
“This collaboration will benefit not only Dover and Honeywell by helping us offer more robust solutions, but also our current and future customers, who will be able to see impactful improvements in their operations with our combined expertise,” said Ali Raza, president, Dover Energy Automation. “Dover brings a history of technology leadership to this partnership that is unmatched.”
Related: Honeywell, Flowserve join forces on Industrial Internet of Things solutions
Collaboration essential to a successful IIoT
As vendors, manufacturers and businesses come together to forge the future of the IIoT, of paramount importance will be a level of stadardization that leaves room for future advances. At a time when security is a top priority across the connected world, collaboration on the scale of Honeywell’s Inspire program is an obvious way to address the pressing issues head-on.
Supplier quality team leader at Rolls-Royce, Shivakumar Movva, writes that while the “Industrial IoT field in its infancy stage is still fragmented, the need of the hour is to encourage collaboration with global industrial partners for open source initiatives. Standardization would be important for successful IIoT implementation by reducing fragmentation and enabling interoperability.”
Speaking exclusively to Internet of Business, Don Empie, director of communications at Honeywell, explained how important the ecosystem its developing is to the future of the IIoT.
“There are three key pieces for the Industrial Internet of Things, that Honeywell calls the Connected Plant. You need to be able to securely collect the key operating data, make that data accessible to experts such as data scientists and engineers for analysis and ultimately act on the results of the analysis to improve plant profitability,” he said.
“That’s where the Honeywell ecosystem comes in. We are bringing together OEMs, consultants and process experts with deep domain expertise within the INspire partner program to tackle problems that were previously considered unsolvable. Problems that the customer could not solve alone – such as eliminating unplanned downtime, inefficient supply chains and off-spec production. Areas like these are where the ecosystem of domain experts can have a huge impact on operational efficiency.”