Your universe is accelerating

We see that the world we live in is entering another new chapter in human development, thanks to extraordinary technological advances on a par with previous industrial revolutions. We see we are entering a Fourth Industrial Revolution—Industry 4.0.

Industry 4.0 is marked by merging the physical, digital and biological worlds in ways that create both considerable promise and potential peril. This revolution’s speed, breadth, and depth force us to rethink how countries develop, how organisations create value, and what it means to be human. This age is more than just technology-driven change. It’s an opportunity to help everyone, including leaders, policy-makers and people from all income groups and nations, harness converging technologies to create an inclusive, human-centred future.

The real opportunity is to first look beyond technology and find ways to give the most significant number of people the ability to impact their families, organisations, communities, and countries positively. And then to image how technology can help us achieve these goals.

The clues of Industry 4.0 are everywhere

Global warming is now looking to science and new technology for solutions—and getting them. COVID has had some positives—with the right technology in place, working from home is not only possible but also largely more productive. And we see where once humans laboured, cognitive automation and operational technology has allowed humans to focus on decision making. However, we also see many organisations not yet participating in this revolution, let alone leading it.

Instead, we see many organisations struggling to adapt — persisting with framing their future in terms of their current mode of operation and past successes. Left unchecked, these businesses will be left behind and, in time, fail. They will be the businesses that define what came before Industry 4.0.

There is a new way

What we need to do is imagine a better future. A better future where our customers and users are getting more, faster and higher quality. A future where our people are safe and more productive. And a future where business is redefined by goals that we could once only imagine but now enabled by technology which has become part of our business strategies.

What we need to do now is imagine a better future.

Building your future

We bring the expertise you need to imagine a better future and help you build it. Expertise in our industry and technical experiences, the array of skills we have, and the technologies we choose. Together with SECTION6, these capabilities help you unlock the opportunities created by Industry 4.0— allowing you to imagine and build a better future.

 
Our expertise is at the edge of transformation—where maturity meets innovation and delivers you the maximum value. To enable you to gain the transformative benefits of software, we invest in those capabilities that align with our mission and purpose to build mission-critical software for organisations essential in people’s lives—and doing this by making complex requirements and software as simple as possible.

Knowing that the technology universe is continually expanding, we have identified six key capabilities that encapsulate the latest in mature technology innovation that we know enable our clients in the industries we serve to meet their goals better, faster, and for longer into the future.

Industry 4.0 Experties

DevOps

Imagine people from IT operations, software development, testing, security and the business working together with a shared goal. Not building technology for technology’s sake, but instead working together with a joint focus and understanding of the target outcome — business lead and technology delivered.  Then, when working like this, imagine being able to trust to explore, learn, and create new business models to serve your organisations now and into the future.

BUILD WITH DEVOPS  NOW 
DevOps enables business agility with improved reliability, economics, and security. DevOps is a practice that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) and shortens the systems development through continuous delivery with a focus on software quality and security.

DevOps is complementary to Agile software development. Together, delivering more reliably and to a higher standard of quality. Importantly, in a world where software is becoming more complex not less, DevOps helps address the increasing complexity of Software requirements and delivery.

Cognitive Automation

Consider the tasks most critical to your business. Those tasks with the best opportunity for automation, if only a machine had the judgment of a human, and a human had the speed and the low error rate of a machine. 

Now imagine applying cognitive automation to these tasks. Because, with the maturity of Industry 4.0 technologies, this is now possible. And imagine, if you do not do it, your competitors will, or worse they are, already.

BUILD WITH COGNITIVE AUTOMATION NOW 
While robotics automates work done by hand, cognitive automation focusses on work using our heads. Cognitive Automation simulates the human learning procedure to grasp knowledge from the dataset and extract the patterns on which it can make judgments that are often better and faster than humans. And because it can use many different data sources such as images, video, audio and text, its decision making is independent of the type and source of data. Cognitive automation unlocks and leverages all of your information together.

On Demand Compute

Imagine consuming compute resource like you would electricity: external cloud utilities for convenience; on-premise for add security of supply; and  the edge-computing like an additional battery power pack for location independence and add reliability. 

Under these conditions, it becomes less critical to wonder where and how you will consume compute resource. Instead focus on the more pressing question of how to innovate your business. Computing resource is not an inhibit but now instead is the enabler. 

BUILD WITH ON-DEMAND COMPUTE POWER NOW
The on-demand model was developed to overcome the common challenge to an enterprise of being able to meet fluctuating demands efficiently. Because an enterprise’s demand for computing resources can vary drastically from one time to another, maintaining sufficient resources to meet peak requirements can be costly. Conversely, if an enterprise tried to cut costs by only maintaining minimal computing resources, it is likely there will not be sufficient resources to meet peak requirements. This is what the cloud addressed for many. But the cloud has its own performance issues. Edge computing emerged to bring video and other static content closer to the user. Edge compute is now being used not only for speed but also for increased resilience.  

Industrial IOT

Imagine your physical assets and the systems they are part of—adjusting to changes in their environments, including their own health. Instead of running to failure, machines dynamically adapt their control algorithms to compensate for worn parts, communicate their status and allow other machines to compensate for their degraded performance. While also scheduling a maintenance task.

And if you are not using machines now, imagine where you could. Replace the drudge of what makes up part of your peoples work—and redeploying them to improve the quality of what you deliver to your customers. 

BUILD FOR INDUSTRIAL IOT 
Industrial IoT (Internet of Things) encompasses embedded sensors, software and other technologies to connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet. IIoT devices monitor and control the physical mission system through real-time automation, including cognitive automation. Use IIoT to combine information technology with operational technology and help unleash the benefits of digital technology in the physical and biological world.

Cyber Security

Imagining an industry 4.0 strategy without addressing cybersecurity at the same time is to imagine a nightmare scenario. 

Instead, imagine efficiencies from DevSecOps that deliver both business benefits and address security at the same time. If all business activity is reduced to money, then DevSecOps is about:  

  • Dev—building functionality to increase revenue;
  • Sec—avoiding financial losses (see insert, left); and 
  • Ops— reducing cost through efficiencies.

Imagine making a business case for DevSecOps expressed in monetary term. Terms better understood by those that hold the purse strings. 

BUILD WITH CYBERSECURITY NOW 
Cybersecurity includes information security and protects devices (IIoT) whose value is not just in any data and information but also in the physical tasks they may perform. We increase safety in the DevOps process by constantly adhering to and testing your security policies and requirements. And by injecting into the DevOps pipeline automated testing, static analysis, and the necessary security controls and checks along the DevOps lifecycle. Importantly we make our software easier and faster to adapt and deploy—so that you can respond more quickly when a new vulnerability is identified and patched.

Agile Integration

Monolithic ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) platforms have become a bottleneck and not the promised enabler. Agile Integration re-imagined Integration and sought to overcome the issues of centralised technology that does not keep pace with other technological advancements in the enterprise, and a centralised team with resources working to a different schedule, rhythm and speed. None of which worked for the business as a whole.

Imagine instead an Integration capability that harnesses the best of the modern practices of DevOps and Agile and the technologies of On-Demand compute. Do this so that you can quickly and easily integrate your IIoT, Cognitive Automation and the host of other systems you already have. So that Integration is reliable, scalable, secure and adaptable, at speed. 

BUILD WITH AGILITY INTEGRATION NOW
Agile integration combines otherwise disparate islands of data, devices I(IIoT), and software functionality through integration and microservices inserted between software services, with minimal disruption. Agile integration builds on the principles and practices of agile software development by having an architecture that enables agility by decentralising both the executing platform and the developers that need to create the integrations. In keeping with agile principles, integration work is done by the people closest to the technologies that need to be integrated—people who are better placed to make decisions faster and complete work more efficiently.

Image
SONATYPE PARTNER LOGO
SIREN PARTNER LOGO
ELASTICSEARCH PARTNER LOGO
DATAMASQUE PARTNER
IBM PARTNER LOGO
EDB PARTNER
Microsoft Partner LOGO
NZDIA PARTNER LOGO