Achieving true real-time collaboration between the IT business systems back end and the plant control front end is just not happening – yet. Those that have tried have hit a real-time wall. The competitive business benefits for those that break through this wall include fixed and variable asset cost minimization, predictive maintenance capabilities, and empowerment of operational staff with up-to-date business objectives and business IT staff with timely asset performance metrics.

But, when you connect the two disparate systems, the operational plant managers suspect the IT systems will undermine their plant reliability, and the IT managers knows that the data deluge from the operational side will swamp their network.

• What if you could adopt an integrated infrastructure that guarantees no single point of failure for the operational systems?
• What if your DCS or PLC data could be made immediately available to your Business Intelligence IT systems at a rate they can deal with?

This webinar will introduce you to a proven Real-Time ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) that has been battle tested, literally, in defense applications where significant consequences are the immediate result of a missed data packet or a failed communication.

Speaker: Dave Scheibenhoffer, Director of Market Development

Dave Scheibenhoffer is responsible for orchestrating advanced solutions to customer requirements and for identifying and addressing emerging trends in distributed systems within commercial market segments. Dave has over 25 years of engineering, business development, and sales experience in the data acquisition and embedded systems industries at industry leaders including National Instruments, Wind River, and Texas Instruments.

Learn how to avoid commonly made mistakes when designing your distributed system. Whether it's misunderstanding your data flow or underestimating scale – learn from and apply real-world technical experience to your project.

RTI is the world's leading vendor of real-time middleware. We have direct experience with hundreds of teams building thousands of complex distributed systems. These range from a few computers to thousands, and soon, millions. We have seen, across the dozens of industries we engage, patterns of use, and critical mistakes, that even the best designers can make.

This webinar targets chief engineers and software architects for high-performance distributed systems. It captures some of our experience with these types of systems.

Speaker: Dr. Stan Schneider, Chief Executive Officer

Stan Schneider is a recognized expert in the development and integration of distributed real-time systems. He founded RTI to develop productivity tools for the real-time marketplace. Under his guidance, RTI has grown from inception to a multinational business with offices throughout North America and Europe.

Stan completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. He holds a BS in Applied Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude) and an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan.

Builders of large-scale industrial automation systems must focus on several key system design requirements in order to implement robust distributed systems – Architecture, Interoperability, Scalability, and Performance. OPC-UA provides a solution for addressing Interoperability for heterogeneous distributed systems from the network edge to the business enterprise.

The standards-based RTI Connext product line extends the capabilities of OPC-UA, and other industrial automation standards, to address flexible system architectures and performance at scale. The RTI DataBus is a data super highway or data backbone for your distributed systems to provide architecture flexibility (publish/subscribe, client/server, request/reply patterns as well as flat, hierarchical, federated topologies) and performance at scale (microsecond latencies, millions of messages/sec with 10M+ individual data points).

Learn how to design and implement next-generation industrial automation systems with RTI.

Speaker: Dave Scheibenhoffer, Director of Market Development

Dave Scheibenhoffer is responsible for orchestrating advanced solutions to customer requirements and for identifying and addressing emerging trends in distributed systems within commercial market segments. Dave has over 25 years of engineering, business development, and sales experience in the data acquisition and embedded systems industries at industry leaders including National Instruments, Wind River, and Texas Instruments.

Suppliers of C4I, C2, Cyber, ISR and sensor and weapons platforms are challenged to meet commercial pressure from defense procurement for more capability at lower cost, and from acquisition officials for increasing interoperability across their combat systems in order to be able to enable new system capability through Information Dominance (ID).

RTI will present an architecture and its Connext solution, designed to meet these twin imperatives. Built upon proven open technology, Connext is a foundational system architecture that delivers significant productivity gains in integration, while also enabling discovery and rapid assimilation of existing system entities, potentially from 3rd party suppliers or already deployed in the field of operation.

Given the unique requirements of tactical system-of-systems, the architecture must support both real-time combat systems as well as brigade and command HQ enterprise style systems, bringing them together in a scalable, dynamic, and flexible framework. Connext addresses the performance and scale impedance mismatch between these disparate systems types, and delivers the ability to develop a common infrastructure that runs over DIL (Disconnected Intermittent Loss) communications as well as it does over Ethernet, putting minimal strain on the communications interfaces and maximizing information exchange.

The Connext foundation is in use in over 400 defense programs globally with over 350,000 licensed deployments. It has been approved by the US DoD to TRL9 (Technology Readiness Level).

Attend this webinar to see why this technology is already mandated in multiple defense programs worldwide, and to understand why building interoperability into your systems architecture will enhance your position in future defense program bids.

Speaker: Gordon Hunt, Chief Applications Engineer

Gordon's technical expertise spans embedded systems, distributed real-time systems, robotics, and controls. He is recognized as RTI's Open Architecture expert and principal consultant for distributed system architectures. He routinely provides advanced designs and training to RTI customers and is an active member in the standards communities. Gordon joined RTI in 1999.

As Operational Technologies (OT) like embedded devices, control and monitoring systems are increasingly integrated with Information Technology (IT) systems running in the back office, interaction patterns between systems are becoming more complex and diverse. Publish-Subscribe is the most commonly used messaging pattern for OT systems. It provides the real-time information access, scalability, and loose coupling required for integration of these types of systems. IT and OT integration, however, commonly requires messaging patterns that provide stronger end-to-end properties, such as Guaranteed Delivery, Request-Reply, and (load-balancing) Queues. RTI is greatly enhancing its infrastructure software with new messaging patterns that combine the performance, scalability, and reliability needed by OT systems with the integration and flexible messaging capabilities of IT systems.

Speaker: Dr. Edwin de Jong, Director of Product Management and Strategy, Core Products

Edwin de Jong has more than 15 years experience in the architecture and design of large-scale distributed real-time systems. These systems encompass C4I, radar, track management, multi-sensor data fusion, threat evaluation, weapon and sensor assignment, and simulation and training. Edwin joined RTI in 2005 following RTI's acquisition of 4TEC, a company he co-founded in 2002 and led as CEO. 4TEC provided products and services for distributed real-time database management. 4TEC's customers were major defense contractors, including Thales and Northrop-Grumman.

The world of enterprise infrastructure software is undergoing dramatic change.  Driven by the need to improve efficiencies and optimize their businesses, companies that operate large, physical systems (sometimes called operational systems) at the operational edge are actively working to merge those systems with their IT business applications.  Because enterprise and operational systems are designed around very different architectures, integrating these worlds into a coherent system-of-systems is a sobering technical challenge.  For example, a typical industrial automation system might generate 10's of millions of discrete data points; how does the operational infrastructure move a dynamically changing subset of interest to the IT system's enterprise service bus without overwhelming the ESB and associated system resources?

To meet the challenge, RTI has introduced RTI Connext, a next-generation software infrastructure that fully supports the business objective of integrating IT and OT (operational technology) systems.  Based on the RTI DataBus™ which has been designed into hundreds of high-performance, distributed systems, RTI Connext combines the performance, scalability, and reliability needed by operational systems with the integration and flexible messaging capabilities of IT systems. Connext is the first edge-to-enterprise real-time SOA platform.

Speaker: Curt Schacker, Chief Commercial Officer

Curt Schacker has more than 20 years of proven software engineering, worldwide sales, marketing and business development experience. Most recently, he managed all aspects of business operations for Toroki Communications. In 2001, Schacker co-founded Embedded Solution Partners, which was named Silicon Valley's 20th fastest growing company in 2006. Prior to running his own company, Curt served as a field applications engineer at real-time operating system pioneers Ready Systems and Wind River Systems. At Wind River, he rose to the position of VP of Worldwide Marketing and Corporate Development. Schacker began his career at Lockheed Martin developing flight software for the NASA Hubble Space Telescope before moving into the embedded industry.