Google Cloud and FogHorn partner to boost industrial Internet of Things

FogHorn, which offers an Internet of Things platform for industrial and commercial applications, has partnered with Google's Cloud IoT Core to develop new solutions for the industrial internet of things (IIoT), a company statement said.

An IIoT application involves applying IoT infrastructure to manufacturing processes in order to make machines intelligent enough so that they communicate data between one other. One of the main advantages of IIoT is that it reduces the rate of error that a human hand brings into the system.

Under the partnership, FogHorn's machine learning-enabled analytics platform named Lightning Edge Intelligence hub will be integrated with Google's Cloud IoT Core service, which allows users to connect, manage, and ingest data from millions of globally dispersed devices.

"Cloud IoT Core simply and securely brings the power of Google Cloud's world-class data infrastructure capabilities to the IIoT market," Antony Passemard, head of IoT product management at Google Cloud, said in the statement. “By combining industry-leading edge intelligence from FogHorn, we've created a fully-integrated edge and cloud solution that maximises the insights gained from every IoT device. We think it's a very powerful combination at exactly the right time," he added.

Passemard also said that the information collected by IoT Core from devices can be used for analytics purposes, and at the same time, industrial players could use Google's BigQuery machine learning engine at the cloud and Google Data Studio to study the data.

When it comes to the IIoT approach, the data collected by sensors on machines can be used to streamline operations or do predictive maintenance. But with the addition of FogHorn, the intelligence gleaned from the collected data can be sent back to the edge of IoT networks improving all aspects of operations. Both the companies said that this partnership will be of great advantage to players in the manufacturing, mining and energy sectors.

"Our integration with Google Cloud harmonises the workload and creates new efficiencies from the edge to the cloud across a range of dimensions," David King, chief executive at FogHorn, said. "This approach simplifies the roll-out of innovative, outcome-based IIoT initiatives to improve organisations' competitive edge globally, and we are thrilled to bring this collaboration to market with Google Cloud,” he added.