Take your machines browsing

Actually, it’s not about taking your machines anywhere. It’s really about bringing your machines to you – remotely, over the Internet. Machine-to-machine (M2M) technology enables the connection of machines to people, devices, and/or systems. With the pervasive Internet, it only makes sense to exploit this technology into a value-add situation. We have the technology, so why not use it to better optimize assets, people and time?

With today’s smart field devices and built-in IPs, it’s relatively easy to tap into remote machines and/or equipment and make information available over the Internet. But what about all those legacy devices that only have serial ports? This week, Connect One announced two new affordable external device servers for secure machine-to-machine (M2M) IP connectivity. The Secure iLAN and Secure iWiFi enable any device with an RS-232/RS-485 port to immediately communicate over the Internet in a fully secure manner using LAN or Wireless LAN, respectively.

"Connectivity has become a critical component for many companies to achieve efficient, cost-effective services," noted Ariel Shulman, Connect One’s vice president of sales. "Legacy devices challenge that bottom-line efficiency, yet the cost of replacing them is also prohibitive. With Secure iLAN and iWiFi, this problem is solved. Industrial machines, controllers, and other systems using serial communications can instantly be on-line, configured, managed and monitored over the Internet."

Also this week, ACT’L introduced Talk2M Internet access to machines. Talk2M, which stands for Talk to Machines, is an Internet Service designed to perform remote maintenance and access distant equipment. The key added-value of Talk2M is the full integration of IT security standards by allowing an Internet communication tunnel between the user and the remote machine without any IT network security change on both sides.

According to an August 2007 article in M2M Magazine, there has been some speculation in the industry that M2M is Dead. I don’t buy it. A number of analysts are predicting significant growth in this area. The engineer and technology enthusiast in me sees a tremendous power in remote monitoring capability. Like everything else in this conservative, wait-and-see industry, it will take some time before it’s widely adopted.

There are a number of technology providers in this M2M realm. I’m not a huge fan of Top Ten lists (unless it's on David Letterman) because you never really know the criteria used to include and/or order companies in the list. For whatever it’s worth, Specialty Publishing’s 2008 M2M 100 offers a list of the most important and influential machine-to-machine technology providers.

If you or your company has implemented M2M technology, please share your experiences in our M2M Forum. If you are currently not a member of MyAutomation.com, please take a minute to Register, so you can participate in this and any other upcoming discussions. I, for one, am curious to see how many people are using remote monitoring via the Internet. I’m not asking you to give away any trade secrets, just briefly tell us what you are doing and how it’s working for you.

Enjoy the rest of this Automation Weekly!

Rick Zabel
Vice President, Publisher

Automation Professionals Seek Missing Link for Transactional Six Sigma
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Many manufacturing organizations fail to achieve the full benefit of Six Sigma efforts because their tools lack connectivity to the business systems generating the data.

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