Solutions in Suzhou

Advantech is all out to develop the technology and solutions that will help realize the vision of a smarter planet. Bob Gill reports from the World Partner Conference in Suzhou.

There is a famous Chinese proverb: In heaven there is paradise, on earth there is Suzhou. Indeed, the 2,500 year old city in China’s Jiangsu province is famous for its scenic beauty, something readily apparent in its many canals, bridges, and in ancient, well-preserved gardens that take such evocative names as Humble Administrator’s Garden, Retreat & Reflection Garden, and Lingering Garden.

Although Advantech did not promise to provide heaven on earth at its 2009 World Partner Conference (WPC), that did not stop some 550 partners from 35 countries making the journey to Suzhou for the automation, industrial PC and embedded computing company’s four-day, biennial event.

On offer to the delegates: executive presentations, technology updates, product displays, sectoral workshops, a visit to its main Kunshan factory, plus a host of opportunities to network and make valuable international contacts. As host Chaney Ho, general manager, Greater China, put it in his welcome speech: “The World Partner Conference is a great place to meet, to learn, to talk. And you will have something unique and valuable to take away with you.”

Each WPC is notable for having a theme. In 2007, in Shanghai, it was globalization in the form of “Global Integration, Mass Collaboration”. In 2009, it was the vision of an intelligent future in the form of “Enabling a Smarter Planet”.

Smarter Planet is a concept recently introduced by IBM to encapsulate a future that is increasingly instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. Michelle Kam, director, IBM Institute for Business Value, China, a specially invited guest speaker in Suzhou, provided some examples of just what a smart future may look like.

“A Smart Grid – where sensors collect data consumption patterns to enable intelligent matching of electricity supply and demand; Smart City – where real-time data on vehicle flow is collected to better manage traffic and reduce those long hours spent in jams; and Smart Healthcare – where technology will enable you to manage your own health and access the resources of doctors,” outlined Kam.

She also proposed how companies like Advantech can help accelerate IBM’s vision. “You help to identify new ways where our customers can work smarter, and you provide the kind of technologies that will enable the Smarter Planet.”

Against this backdrop, K C Liu, president and CEO, Advantech, announced that the company would henceforth be structured as two divisions, each with specific agendas: Embedded Design-in Business – mission: to provide Trusted ePlatform Services; and Branding & Solution Business – mission: Enabling a Smarter Planet.

Liu also stressed the need for Advantech and its partners to evolve from a conventional product-based sales approach to one based much more on providing the types of solutions required by customer in its target industries, which he said would require a move towards having sector-driven channel partners.

In addition, Liu identified the six key vertical industries for Advantech:

• Medical/Healthcare

• Factory/Machine Automation

• Power & Energy

• Transportation

• Industrial Mobile (Vehicle) Computing

• Retail, Self-Service & Hospitality

Intelligent signs

One area where Advantech has made notable strides since the last World Partner Conference is in digital signage. These are the displays increasingly found in places like retail stores, airports, and hotels. While Advantech, through its new Intelligent Services group, provides the embedded computer hardware and screen displays, it liaises with a number of solution partners that provide the software.

“Yes, that’s right, we run our software on their hardware,” David Levin, president, Four Winds Interactive, explains to Control Engineering Asia. The Denver based company has seen its revenues double every year for the last four years, and Levin was in Suzhou to make a presentation in the Intelligent Services sector session and also to network with other Advantech partners at the event. “We have a very good relationship with Advantech,” he says. “They understand the technology and the application.”

The growing sophistication of digital signage products can be seen in their increasingly interactive nature. Compared to conventional screens that simply provide static, one-way information, interactive displays – which Four Winds specializes in – allow for twoway communication, with the user interfacing (normally via a touchscreen) with the device and the display responding by changing to the appropriate screen.

In fact, some of the digital signage displays on show at the WPC show just how far the technology has come. Adding an input device such as bar code or RFID reader or a camera allows for contextual personalization of the display and greatly increases its intelligence.

For instance, I stood in front of one display that had a camera mounted on top. This display was smart enough to know if I was male or female and quickly brought up a video advertisement for a sleek BMW. It had decided I was male, thankfully! (For females, an ad for a spa was shown). This display also had the ability to count the number of people viewing the screen, something very useful for measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Healthy market

The Medical/Healthcare market currently contributes 10 percent of Advantech’s business, and no doubt with its eye on an aging population and increasing demands for medical services, the company is intent on seeing that figure rise.

Advantech currently provides several categories of products within its Medical Computing portfolio: Point-of-Care Terminals – computing platforms commonly mounted on nursing carts that increase data recording accuracy and provide instant access to critical information; Medical Imaging Displays – high contrast LCDs for connecting to equipment such as endoscopes; Mobile Clinic Assistants – handheld displays (with touchscreen) to aid medical administration and charting; Patient Infotainment Terminals – interactive bedside terminals that aim to make hospital stays slightly more enjoyable by providing easy access to entertainment and communication options like TV, movies, and the internet.

“It’s essentially an appliance for patients to be able to use,” says Anthony Clark, director of business development, Thinix, another US-based Advantech partner. Thinix provides an extensible software platform, Thinix Rx Healthcare, which integrates with the Advantech Patient Infotainment Terminal. “We are getting a lot of interest from medical centers in the United States and you are seeing patient infotainment on medically certified equipment becoming available in hospital rooms,” he tells CE Asia.

Hardware features of the Windows XP Embedded or Linux based Advantech Patient Infotainment Terminal include a 15” or 17” TFT-LCD with touchscreen, a nurse call button, built-in 1.3 megapixel camera and audio, RFID, Wi-Fi, and smart card reader, integrated TV and radio tuner.

Meanwhile, the Thinix Rx Healthcare Platform provides a user interface with a number of standard features and available options that enable patients to watch TV and movies, listen to the radio, surf the internet and check email, and make telephone calls, to name a few of the options.

Automation aspects

Investing in newer and perhaps more glamorous areas like digital signage and healthcare does not mean that Advantech is neglecting its roots in automation. Far from it. Under the leadership of Ming- Chin Wu, the Industrial Automation Group continues to advance technology, extend market reach, and roll out new products in its three specialized sectors of Automation Computing, Control and I/O, and Industrial Communication.

Revealed at the World Partner Conference in Suzhou was the new PAC (programmable automation controller) product line, the APAX-5000 series. According to Advantech, “This new generation of PACs integrates control, information processing, and networking in a single control system with a unique dual controller architecture that makes it superior to other PACs in the market.”

The APAX-5000 features two standalone CPU modules that work together but are responsible for different tasks. One provides high computing power for HMI/SCADA, recipe, database and communication tasks, while the other is dedicated for SoftLogic I/O tasks.

This means if the HMI/SCADA controller crashes, the I/O processing will continue to work as normal. Separating HMI/ SCADA and I/O processing tasks can prevent unexpected stoppage, decreases operational risks, and ensures higher reliability for critical control tasks.

“Apart from the APAX, I would like to highlight our robust embedded automation controller range, UNO, which is being certified for use in more and more vertical sectors,” Ming-Ching Wu told CE Asia, when quizzed about product highlights and technology direction.

“In remote I/O, I think the direction is for more intelligence. This means we will allocate some program space for the client to write custom software in the device to carry out diagnostics, for example. In industrial communications, meanwhile, we intend to invest more in industrial wireless technology,” revealed Wu.

“As for HMI, the next generation will integrate HMI software with the panels, in order to provide application-ready solutions for machine builders. And WebAccess, our browser-based software package for HMI and SCADA, is increasingly being customized for energy management applications, and I see increasing opportunities for this product in Power & Energy, which is one of our six focus sectors.”

We are the world

This was only the second time that the media had been invited to witness the World Partner Conference. As in Shanghai two years ago, it was a great opportunity to get a more intimate handle on the Taiwanese company’s strategic direction, its technology roadmap, and to get up close to its still vast array of products. It should also be said that Advantech’s top executives seem noticeably humble and always ready to stop and talk – with both the press and with partners.

In the automation arena, it is still rare to find a company that has grown out of Asia and made a name for itself right across the globe – as is evident from the presence of partners from places like Brazil, Poland, Pakistan, Spain, and Canada who made the trek to China for the 2009 WPC.

Advantech continues to make strides in its core embedded systems and industrial automation technology sectors, and is increasingly seeing the fruits of initiatives in newer areas like digital signage, medical computing, intelligent lighting, and video surveillance. No doubt, tomorrow’s world is set to be a lot smarter than it is today, and Advantech’s technology should play no small part in that evolution.

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Anticipating the Smart Future

In Suzhou, David Soon, managing director, Advantech South Asia Pacific, talked to CE Asia about the company’s role in enabling the smarter world of tomorrow.

Q: Your thoughts on this year’s “smarter planet” theme?

A: From Advantech’s point of view, we’ve traditionally been in the business of eplatform services, which is a very generic term to do with how we automate equipment and so forth. But now, we are moving up one level into how we go about making that equipment smarter, by providing information, and the ability to decipher and receive that information, to make necessary decisions such as for energy management, etc. So what Advantech is able to do – to help enable this smarter planet initiative – is to provide platforms to enable more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent equipment.

Q: Are there any products that have particularly caught your eye?

A: Actually, rather than specific products, I think one of the more interesting things I see in this WPC event is a lot more solution-oriented approaches coming out. So again, when we talk about the smarter planet initiative, it is really about the idea that you may have the technology, but how do you make it work for you in a smart way?

The solution approach is one of the ways that we could actually go about bringing about this smarter initiative, enabling our system integrators to consider the solutions that we have and making those solutions available to their end users, i.e. the end customers.

The solution part of it requires a lot of collaboration, and I think over in this WPC, you probably find that is not just the normal reseller or the channel partners that we are more engaged with. Rather, you will find more sharing from our solution partners in terms of developing a solution, in how certain things are done, and in educating everybody about how a particular vertical industry is moving.

Q: So how long will it take for Advantech to transform into a solutions based company?

A: I think it will always be evolving; solutions are always getting better, technology is advancing, so there’s never an end to it. It will never be, you have one solution and that’s going to be the end of it. Some of these advances in technology enable new ideas, new solutions to come forth. So I think that moving forward in solutions is a good way for the company to go, rather than trapping ourselves into just the technology. To stay current and engaged in the game, solution focus selling has to be a key, important piece of our whole strategy

For Advantech, as we try to develop and deploy some of the technology advances by our suppliers – such as chips from Intel, for example – in our products, we also have to figure out the end market and the end user. It’s not always that the market itself knows what it wants, or for that matter, knows what technology and solution is available, so sometimes, there is a need to jump start some of these ideas.

If you have a solution based approach to the problems, you basically provide an initial trigger as to how these problems can be resolved through the solutions that you have to offer. And over time, new problems may be encountered where the solution may be deficient and not be able to fulfill, but then that allows you the opportunity to reinvent yourself, to re-explore again, are there new technologies, new partners available that you can integrate in order to evolve into something better for the future.

Q: When there are new market opportunities, is it up to educate your partners or do they come to you?

A: I think there will always be new partners who will be excited about what we have to offer and we can help them tap into new opportunities they see coming up in their markets and countries. So for these new partners, we will engage them in a way to share with them our technology.

For partners that have been with us over the years, if they have an interest to grow into a particular area then the learning and development will also happen, given the fact that they are familiar with the technology and it’s really how to give it a different twist in terms of the applications, in terms of the service model and the selling model.

Our channel partners are definitely excited by the kind of progress we are making in terms of searching out new opportunities for them. It is going to be a win-win relationship for us both in that we help then move them up to the next level so that they can then open up and exploit some of these new market opportunities for us as well.

Q: How do you feel about the future for Advantech?

A: Companies are always reinventing and transforming themselves, and I think as long as Advantech continues to do that, to engage with the realities of the market, in what is happening, we will continue to be a very active player and will also help shape what the future will be like.