Nokia expands industrial edge applications to drive Industry 4.0

Nokia has launched four third-party applications for MX Industrial Edge (MXIE), which help enterprises connect, collect and analyze data from operational technology (OT) assets on a robust and secure on-premises edge.

Asset-heavy industries can accelerate their digital transformation and benefit most from Nokia’s OT edge ecosystem-neutral approach, which taps into innovation from many top digitalization enablers. The new applications also leverage the GPU capability recently announced on Nokia MXIE, a powerful on-premises OT edge solution that helps process data closest to the source in real time while retaining data sovereignty.

As enterprises move to digitalize operations they face some significant challenges. These include the collection, integration and analysis of all types of data – including video – from disparate systems, sensors and data silos, and having the certainty that sensitive data is protected once shared with other cloud ecosystems. With highly reliable 4.9G/5G private wireless connectivity and the low latency processing power of Nokia MXIE, these industry-leading applications help enterprises overcome these challenges making enterprise data usable, actionable and secure. As a result, many transformative use cases can be created, spanning early alerts and anomaly detection, condition monitoring, preventive and predictive maintenance, digital twins and more – all of which help improve operations and increase return on investment.

Additions to the Nokia Industrial Application Catalog include:

Atos Computer Vision - Quality Inspector: Part of the Eviden business within Atos Group, this solution uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide applications which improve quality and productivity in manufacturing environments. It leverages modern deep learning to detect defects, foreign objects, anomalies, or incorrect setups with AI-based video analytics in real time. Enhanced by the new MXIE GPU capability, enterprises can quickly deliver models that achieve high accuracy even in challenging conditions.

Crosser: The low code streaming analytics and integration platform for industrial IoT and industry 4.0. Users can access a rich library of pre-built modules and connectors to build Intelligent data flows and pipelines for preprocessing, analyzing and acting on industrial data. Live loops of streaming data can be created for ingesting transformed, ready-to-use data to any machine, service, cloud, IoT platform or digital twin.
Litmus Edge: The industrial edge data platform that puts data to work for operations to transform at scale.

Unifying data collection, normalization, contextualization, and analytics at the edge and cloud, Litmus Edge unlocks intelligence to improve efficiency and profitability. Nearly 300 pre-built device drivers and integrations for OT assets and enterprise systems, along with digital twin and machine learning models, make it easier to address asset monitoring, anomaly detection, energy consumption, forecasting, predictive maintenance and more.

Palo Alto Networks Next-Gen Firewall: Advanced security powered by Palo Alto Networks. Palo Alto Networks software Next Generation Firewalls (VM-Series and CN-Series) deployed on MXIE uses AI and ML to prevent sophisticated cyber threats in the OT environment, without adding physical hardware to the network. The comprehensive solution has industry-leading capabilities such as Advanced Threat Prevention, which blocks unknown command-and-control and exploit attempts in real-time, Advanced WildFire, which stops highly evasive malware, DNS Security, which stops emerging DNS based attacks. Additionally, IoT/OT Security quickly profiles all OT, IT and IoT devices and assets, and protects them. This enables advanced security on both the IT and OT sides of the network to protect the entire organization with best-in-class security.

Today’s news builds on Nokia’s partnership with Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, which has a focus on designing, deploying, and managing industry-leading LTE and 5G private wireless networks and Industry 4.0 solutions to enterprises worldwide. By combining Kyndryl’s network and edge advisory and integration services with Nokia’s private wireless networks, industrial customers can achieve high-performance wireless connectivity in mission-critical environments.

As a converged compute platform, Nokia MXIE supports the core operation of private wireless networks and hosts a multitude of OT edge computing applications. By leveraging Nokia MXIE, Kyndryl is helping customers implement end-to-end industrial use cases with a single orchestrated on-premises edge for both private wireless and digitalization enablers. The automation and digitalization benefits, from predictive maintenance, better worker safety, to quality assurance enables smarter, leaner factory operations and improves sustainability across industrial verticals – from manufacturing, energy and gas, to mining.

Chris McReynolds, Vice President, Offering Management, Network and Edge Practice at Kyndryl, said: “We are pleased to expand our partnership with Nokia by integrating some of our customers’ mission-critical applications – Litmus Edge and Palo Alto Next Gen Firewall – on the Nokia MX Industrial Edge. Advanced IIoT edge platforms that facilitate a holistic view of enterprise-wide data, along with advanced security, are fundamental to enterprises who are seeking to accelerate their digital transformation to meet Industry 4.0 standards and create maximum business value.”

Stephan Litjens, Vice President of Enterprise Solutions at Nokia, said: “These new applications unlock operational technology data from their silos while maintaining data security and privacy, which asset-heavy, mission-critical environments require for digital transformation. As we continue to expand the Nokia Industrial Application Catalog and work with leading software vendors and cloud providers, our ecosystem-neutral approach for MXIE means enterprises can choose best-of-breed applications to support a range of industrial use cases. This ultimately improves efficiency, worker safety and sustainability in our customers’ operations.”