These new microservices around the Lumada platform are designed to provide maintenance recommendations for industries like transportation, manufacturing and energy, which can be devastated by surprise breakdowns.
SAN DIEGO – At their NEXT customer event here, Hitachi Vantara has strengthened their Lumada platform, which is a fundamental component of their strategy to dominate the Internet of Things space. They have expanded their available microservices with the addition of Lumada Maintenance Insights solutions. Targeted at environments that cannot tolerate disruptions caused by machinery breakdowns, the new services use prescriptive and predictive algorithms that anticipate problems and guide ustomers on necessary maintenance repairs to avoid actual breakdowns and avoid downtime.
At last year’s inaugural NEXT event, Hitachi announced the formation of Hitachi Ventara through the integration of Hitachi Data Services, Pentaho, and the Hitachi Insight Group, in order to create a powerhouse company to focus on leveraging Hitachi’s strengths in both IT and OT [operational technology] and become dominant in the Internet of Things. Lumada was actually developed by the Hitachi Insight Group, and while it had been around for a year when Hitachi Vantara was created, it was effectively rebooted at the 2017 NEXT event as a flagship product of the new organization, with the company using NEXT to publicize it to customers. The platform’s strength comes from its ability to blend data, looking across all of it to derive intelligent decisions from it.
The Lumada microservices solutions are the culmination of a long value chain, which can be traced through the Solutions Expo at the event, said Paul Lewis, global vice president of industry and enterprise architecture at Hitachi Vantara.
“It starts with the Hitachi Labs – data scientists inventing algorithms,” Lewis said. “Next comes Hitachi Smart Spaces and Video Intelligence, which use our ability to connect to endpoints like cameras and the LiDAR technology, which can identify what customers pick up from shelves in stores, and use these to create social value, like safer environments in grocery stores or an overlay for 911 emergencies. We then use our series of industry solutions to create manufacturing insights, like predictive maintenance, facilitated by AI like Lumada’s digital twins, digital avatars of a physical asset. Then come the Lumada services – the microservices set that we use that are a key part of the Lumada ecosystem. Lumada is always a services-first conversation. It’s all about co-creation with clients to generate value engineering, and how we can implement it in a specific customer’s plan, or hospital or other environment.”
These new Lumada Maintenance Insights solutions are new microservices which have specific utility for the transportation, manufacturing and energy industries, all of which all rely on complex equipment, and all of which can suffer huge cost and safety consequences from surprise downtimes caused by that equipment breaking. They use machine learning models that can be rapidly customized for specific assets and operational workflows. They assess equipment health with live and historical repair data, then analyze this data to recommend which maintenance or repair actions should be taken and when to execute them, providing specific repair recommendations, maintenance schedule optimization, parts supply optimization and maintenance effectiveness.
“These are professional services around co-creation, but they are facilitated by our channel partners,” Lewis said. “The channel has the relationships that we don’t have with these kinds of customers, and they bring us into these OT conversations. They have a far broader reach into these types of clients.”
Lumada Maintenance Insights solutions by Hitachi are available now in early adopter stage. Global general availability is scheduled for April 2019.
