At Reekoh, we have had a front row seat to the rapid changes occurring in the industrial market, regarding the adoption of greater digital and cloud solutions. This has had implications not just for the end-customer, but for the entire solution supplier ecosystem; from the traditional industrial automation vendors and distributors who enable the provision of solutions, through to the system integrators who consult, architect, implement and support these solutions.
The role of the modern industrial system integrator
Industrial system integrators have understood for a long time that integrating data between OT and IT systems is an important component of large-scale solutions and has been mainly solved through a “custom build” solution. This wasn’t always able to be scaled or supported very well, and in many cases then became an operational risk to the business over the long term.
At the same time, demand for solutions that are lower-cost and easier to implement, across on-prem / Edge and cloud, has also been growing , whether that be along the lines of process automation, advanced visualisation, analytics, AI or Machine Learning.
It’s these sometimes competing functional, non-functional and commercial requirements that need to be met in order for the customer, and the implementation partner, to be successful.
As an example, one of our manufacturing customers has been able to quickly achieve automated SAP work order management using SCADA tag data from on-prem and cloud historians. But it wasn’t just the fact that these systems needed to become more interoperable – it was also HOW that happened, and how plant workers who usually spent a lot of time manually programming PLC’s with SAP work order data info needed to be able to achieve this more efficiently and securely across multiple sites through a new, but “simple to understand” mechanism.
Keeping pace with the needs to bring together disparate data from within an operation has been challenging, especially as the rate of growth in those data silos has accelerated. And trying to keep a workforce skilled with the right tools to address these needs, which in many areas are in product domains that aren’t core to their business, has highlighted a growing skills and capability gap.
How SI’s work with Reekoh
Reekoh is rapidly growing its relationships with industrial system integrators to fill these gaps, and to enable them to add value to their existing customer bases regardless of which industrial sector they happen to be in. Our current engagements in the US market with system integrators who service the Oil & Gas, Manufacturing, Energy, Utilities and Infrastructure (Cities, Building, Data Centers) segments demonstrate that integration is a critical capability that needs to be catered for through a mixture of “pre-packaged” and architected enterprise solutions.
Our hybrid integration platform bridges these gaps and enable system integrators to deliver high-value solutions using low-code, agile tools such as the 200+ pre-built integrations in our library, our visual Pipeline Studio, edge and cloud deployment options and more.
Our delivery teams are also able to work with you and your customers on initial engagements to provide those specialist skills. We can then deliver training to your teams to empower you to deliver these services on your own, supported by Reekoh, in the future (our system integrator certifications program is taking further shape in the coming months).
If you’re an industrial systems integrator, now is the time to be talking to us.
Dale Rankine is Reekoh’s Founder and CEO
