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Business Solutions

ANALYTICS AT THE EDGE

MARC PETOCK
Chief Communications Officer & VP, Marketing
Lynxspring

ONE OF THE PRIMARY appeals of IoT within the built work—close to the things that are the source of the data,
environment is the ability to connect to existing data-rich such as sensors, controllers, equipment, and machines
devices and equipment for greater analysis and insight residing in a building, campus, and or control rooms.
into their operation and performance. Over the past cou- Also known as distributed analytics, it means analytics
ple of years, we have seen clear movement toward com- is performed at the point where (or very close to where)
puting and intelligence to the edge. With it, the industry the data is collected (at the device level) rather than
is moving towards a distributed data architecture where requiring it be sent back to the Cloud before any value
multiple nodes work together to perform analytics at can be derived.
the edge.
We recognize that
Computing and ana- the ever-increasing
lytics are increasingly flow of data and ana-
beginning to reside lytics must be man-
at the equipment aged more efficiently
and device sources, to optimize infor-
enabling data to be mation utilization,
generated faster, more reduce costs, and
efficiently and more improve business
reliably than ever performance. Edge
before. The ongoing analytics clearly
evolution of micro-pro- offers many bene-
cessing technology fits. By incorporating
has meant that suffi- analytics at the edge,
cient computing power facility management
to perform the heavy operations can rap-
lifting of data analysis idly accelerate pro-
can now be performed cesses, reduce data
directly onboard the storage and data
devices themselves. transfer costs and
This evolution is happening because of the need to improve system resilience and performance.
streamline the amount and types of data, reduce latency
and manage bandwidth, reduce the amount of data The flexibility and power of edge devices makes them
sent to the cloud, reduce complexity, decrease network, useful in a wide variety of applications and built envi-
improve system response time, and decrease potential ronments. By offering facility owners and operators an
failure points. The result is the advent of Edge Analytics. opportunity to improve data processing and analytics
locally at the device level, edge devices are an attractive
What is Edge Analytics? It’s an approach that provides tool for facilities of all shapes and sizes. For these rea-
analytics at the point of data collection, on devices sons, these devices will continue to drive change in the
themselves and in the gateways at the edge of the net- built environment over the next decade.

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