Intelligent Infrastructure and Connected Systems
Industrial IoT
Industrial IoT engineering that connects PLCs, historians and plant equipment to analytics and enterprise systems, with OT safety and network segmentation designed in.
Overview
Plants already hold large amounts of data, but it is scattered across PLCs, distributed control systems, historians and spreadsheets kept by individual engineers. Industrial IoT is less about adding sensors than about making existing signals usable beyond the control room, without compromising the systems that keep production running.
We build industrial data pipelines using OPC UA, Modbus and MQTT with Sparkplug B, structured around ISA-95 levels and segmented network zones. The result is a governed flow of contextualised data into time-series platforms, analytics and enterprise applications.
Business applications
- 01
Unified namespace for plant data
Publish equipment states, process values and production events into a structured MQTT namespace using Sparkplug B, giving MES, analytics and maintenance tools one self-describing source instead of brittle point-to-point integrations.
- 02
Production performance visibility
Derive availability, performance and quality from machine states and counts, so supervisors can see where losses accumulate by line, shift and product rather than reconstructing them from end-of-shift reports.
- 03
Energy and utility consumption tracking
Meter compressed air, steam, water and electricity at the asset level and correlate consumption with production volume, supporting energy-reduction programs and sustainability reporting with traceable data.
- 04
Brownfield equipment retrofit
Bring older machines online with non-invasive sensors and protocol gateways, extracting useful condition and production signals from equipment that predates modern connectivity, without modifying its control logic.
Engineering approach
- 01
Survey the OT landscape
With the site's controls engineers, we inventory controllers, protocols, historians and network topology, documenting what exists, who owns it and which systems are safety-critical.
- 02
Design zones and conduits
Following ISA/IEC 62443 concepts, we define network zones, industrial DMZ placement and the specific conduits through which data may leave the OT network, defaulting to outbound, read-only flows.
- 03
Contextualise at the edge
Edge gateways translate OPC UA and Modbus into MQTT, attach asset hierarchy and engineering units based on ISA-95 models, and buffer data through network interruptions.
- 04
Land data in governed storage
Contextualised data flows into time-series databases or existing historians, with retention, access control and lineage defined so engineering and IT teams trust the same numbers.
- 05
Prove value on one line
Data quality and usefulness are validated on a single line or area with operators and engineers before the approach is templated for additional assets and sites.
Technologies and platforms
Industrial protocols
- OPC UA
- Modbus TCP/RTU
- EtherNet/IP
- MQTT
- Sparkplug B
Edge and integration
- Node-RED
- AWS IoT Greengrass
- Azure IoT Edge
- HiveMQ
- Docker
Data and historians
- AVEVA PI System (formerly OSIsoft PI)
- TimescaleDB
- InfluxDB
- Apache Kafka
- Grafana
Reference standards
- ISA-95
- ISA-88
- ISA/IEC 62443
- NIST SP 800-82
Technology names are trademarks of their respective owners and do not imply partnership or endorsement.
What you receive
- OT asset and data-flow inventory with ownership and criticality
- Network zone and conduit design aligned with ISA/IEC 62443 concepts
- ISA-95-structured asset model and MQTT topic namespace
- Edge gateway configuration and deployment templates
- Time-series data platform with retention and access policies
- Production or energy dashboards validated with site engineers
Questions leaders ask
Will connecting our plant increase cybersecurity risk?
Any new connection changes the risk profile, which is why we design for it explicitly. Data leaves the OT network through defined conduits, typically outbound-only through an industrial DMZ, with no inbound paths to controllers. The design is documented so your security and plant teams can review it against ISA/IEC 62443 and internal policy.
Do we need to replace our existing historian?
Usually not. Historians such as AVEVA PI often hold a long operating record that engineering teams rely on. We typically integrate the historian as a source and complement it with cloud or time-series storage for analytics and cross-site use, rather than displacing a system that already works.
Can you work with equipment from multiple vendors?
Yes. Mixed equipment is the norm in brownfield plants. OPC UA and Modbus cover much of the installed base, and protocol gateways handle many proprietary interfaces. Where a controller cannot be read safely or supportably, we say so and propose alternatives such as external sensors.
Related solutions
Related industries
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