MINTICC: The solution to help industrial companies make the definitive transition to Industry 4.0
Gradiant and Ednon, a company that integrates advanced services in information and communication technologies, are working on the MINTICC project (Modernization of the Industry using Technologies for Computer Infrastructure based on Containers) to develop solutions that facilitate the adaptation to Industry 4.0 of small companies and unify processes in large industrial corporations, covering their needs for streamlining day-to-day management.
MINTICC can be a solution to ensure that small industrial companies are not left out of digitalization and that changes in the environment do not reduce their competitiveness. In this sense, the tool draws from the DevOps culture, deeply known by Gradiant, and already adopted by many companies to apply technological innovation in response to their needs and opportunities in the market.
To that effect Jose Otero, technical manager of Cloud Computing within the Services and Applications area of Gradiant, points out that after many years of working and developing cloud computing solutions, “we have seen the opportunity to apply it to the industry sector 4.0”. Otero states that “the development of cloud solutions for the industry offers several advantages, including reducing deployment costs through simplification and turnkey automation, improving agility and adaptability to change, optimizing infrastructure use and implementing best practices in services and infrastructure Industry 4.0”.
All of this is aimed at collaborating with Ednon to develop the components that make up the final solution, adapted to the specific needs of companies and organisations that include mass production or assembly line processes, such as in the automotive industry or the logistics sector. As David Patiño, R&D Manager at Ednon explains, “Our industrial customers need to improve their competitiveness by optimizing the use of their infrastructure and reducing the costs of deploying their services. This is where Ednon becomes an ally to face this digital transformation so necessary in the sector because we have been betting strongly on innovation for several years now, through Ednonlabs_ (R&D area attached to Ednon) which leads a whole new line of developments adapted to the industry sector 4.0. In addition to this, we put special focus on meeting the growing cybersecurity needs of the I4.0 ecosystem”.
Industry 4.0: future already present for companies
The benefit of this solution for the business community is double. On one hand, MINTICC makes it possible for small companies to move to industry 4.0, saving costs, since it facilitates and speeds up the process of digitalising their working methods, internal tools and corporate services without the large investments in human and technical resources that would be necessary for this.
On the other hand, it is useful for large companies to unify processes and simplify work, since the added value that the solution developed in MINTICC will provide for day-to-day management will be the automation of processes, the management of hyper-conversive infrastructures and the life cycle of the services that are deployed on them, optimizing the system and providing coverage to a large number of customers. This tool will allow enterprise system administrators to centralize the installation and execution of corporate applications and, above all, automate tasks such as deploying backups, monitoring, scaling, continuous integration or multi-cloud or hybrid cloud management.
Easy incorporation into companies
The solutions developed by Gradiant and Ednon facilitate the adoption of private and public cloud infrastructures from the same space, based on cutting-edge technologies that significantly improve the performance of business processes and, at the same time, allow them to optimize both their operational costs (OPEX) in ICT infrastructures and their investments (CAPEX). All of them are also developed in a plug & play model so that they can be used without the need to install specific software for their operation.
This will enable the provision of a management service for these infrastructures to a very large number of small industrial customers with a limited number of system and network administrators. To achieve this, MINTICC provides tools to simplify management, automate as much as possible the work, and reduce the use of resources to fit the type of customers who want to provide the service.
