Intelligent Plant says that historically, major automation companies developed and sold expensive infrastructure and systems that locked in clients, as once an investment had been made, only they could provide products and services compatible with that infrastructure.
Instead, this marketplace is open to anyone wanting to develop and sell an industrial app over the Internet, while taking away all the difficulties normally associated with connectivity and data security. In addition, app developers retain and host their own apps on the Industrial App Store, so they don’t have to disclose to Intelligent Plant or the end users the domain knowledge contained within the app, which protects them from cloning or hacking their intellectual property. It also means that the client doesn’t need to expose its network to an app developer.
Industrial App Store manages access to client data and only allows apps to request the data for which they have been given the necessary privileges. The data request from an authorised app is routed to the client’s data historian by the Industrial App Store and passes the data back to the app.
The clients maintain intellectual and physical ownership of their data and there is no write back to their own data historian, only to a separate app results historian that Intelligent Plant provides for free.
The beauty of this arrangement is that Industrial App Store clients don’t have to manage multiple connections and data requests in different formats and protocols to their servers on an ongoing basis. This reduces their cybersecurity risk to a single app store connection, which is established and tested once, is more easily monitored and, once set up, needs very little maintenance or support.
Examples of app functions include tracking valve movements, monitoring controllers, measuring alarm performance against industry standards and guidance, monitoring hydraulic fluid usage in subsea equipment.
Also, Microsoft’s Power Platform, an app development suite, can access process data using the Industrial App Store. It can be visualised in Power BI, acted on using Power Automate and accessed using Power Apps.
The costs of all apps are transparent to encourage competition. Customer ratings in the form of star ratings are also built into the Industrial App Store, providing purchasers with visibility and confidence in user feedback.