San Jose, CA., USA. 15 February 2023 – Ataya, a technology company focused on connectivity challenges associated with Industry 4.0 adoption, has announced the availability of Harmony, which it claims is the only universal connectivity platform for industrial networks.
Harmony embraces legacy technologies and future-proofs industrial networks, allowing for the introduction of new technologies without downtimes or security concerns. It delivers enhanced security and a single management pane to monitor and troubleshoot all Wi-Fi, Ethernet, IoT and 5G devices. Ataya will be showcasing Harmony at the upcoming Mobile World Congress (MWC) event starting on Monday, February 27 in Barcelona. MWC attendees can see Harmony in action in Hall 5, booth 5A61.
Due to the age of their existing infrastructure, many organisations have still not been able to systematically deploy Industry 4.0 technologies across their operations. These “brownfield” deployments carry challenges: reliable connectivity, security, administration and management are chronic problems. Existing platforms that apply new connectivity technology to address mobility requirements expose security loopholes or other inefficiencies.
“We see a great deal of complexity in enterprise networking. As they address multiple use cases and myriad applications, enterprises are operating multiple wireless and wired networks, ranging from Wi-Fi, industrial Ethernet, private LTE/5G, and other proprietary technologies,” says Kyung Mun of mobile experts. “While we forecast the industrial private cellular market will grow at 20% CAGR until 2028, it will remain a subset of the broader industrial communications market. That implies managing connected devices across different technologies will be a major challenge for enterprises, and opportunity for products such as Ataya Harmony,” concludes Mun.
‘Simple, secure and universal connectivity’ claims
Harmony’s reported simplicity, powered by zero touch provisioning, is said to enable installation and deployment in less than 15 minutes. Harmony’s Universal Connectivity feature provides a single pane of glass for all clients (e.g.,Wi-Fi, Ethernet, 5G) and an integrated pane for managing the access network and the universal data plane.
Ataya claims that with Harmony, OT networks have end-to-end client security for 5G and non-5G clients via fine grained access and threat control. In addition, Harmony says to reduce the attack surface by enabling customers to define client group-based microsegments. Designed as cloud-native with a microservices architecture, Harmony aims to ensure rapid and secure deployment of edge applications (such as SCADA systems) and that service level objectives for bandwidth, latency and jitter are met.
Manufacturers ‘unlock gains’
Today’s launch of Harmony comes after successful implementations at hardware provider Quanta Computer and embedded and edge computing provider ADLINK.
“Ataya is our valuable partner in connectivity solution development. The collaboration with Ataya’s Harmony platform integration not only accelerated our 5G enterprise small cell product development and deployment process, but also provided a rich set of features in the private wireless market,” says Steve Chang, vice president, Quanta Computer.
“As private 5G provides unique values to smart manufacturing sectors, we have selected Ataya’s Harmony platform as the foundation of ADLINK private 5G solution, with integration of autonomous robots for smart manufacturing use cases. We believe that Harmony’s universal connectivity proposition will be key to smoothly integrating the 5G technologies into the existing and emerging network services in smart factories worldwide,” says Eric Kao, GM, network communication and automotive (NCA) BU, ADLINK.
“5G, Wi-Fi and Ethernet, despite their essential differences, are all becoming software-defined and HW-SW disaggregated. This convergence is an exceptional point in technological evolution, and this unison of networking technologies into cloud-native and disaggregated architectures makes Harmony possible. It was clear to us that we must exploit the convergence to build a unifying platform. But, it is not just about convergence but also being able to offer new value, as we can offer 5G-like QoS features over Wi-Fi and other legacy OT technologies,” says Puneet Sethi, SVP of products at Ataya.
McKinsey & Co. research (Capturing the True Value of Industry 4.0, April 2022) indicates that challenges related to digital transformation are blocking the overall value potential of Industry 4.0, which McKinsey estimates to be between USD $1.4 trillion (€1.31 trillion) and $3.3 trillion (€3.08 trillion) by 2030.
“Harmony’s architecture brings together and applies years of enterprise and telecom innovations to industrial environments for the first time,” says Rajesh Pazhyannur, CEO of Ataya. “Our solution provides universal connectivity along with 5G features that eliminates the need to ‘lift and shift’, enabling a painless deployment of Industry 4.0 technologies.”
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