The fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0, as it is alternately called, is no stranger to modern machine builders. Today it is common for them to offer cloud services for remote monitoring of their products.

I will not mention brands but some examples. There are HVAC equipment, pneumatic systems, road machinery, generator sets, etc. etc. whose electronic control units are connected to the cloud to report their operating parameters. Sometimes they do it using electronics that are already integrated into the equipment, while in other cases they use external communication modules. In all these cases, manufacturers offer a web application or App to install on mobile devices that allows their customers to register their devices and monitor them remotely.

For the user, it is very good to be able to connect to the cloud of their equipment provider to configure, supervise them and even define alarms and notifications that are triggered automatically when something is not right. If the company works with a single brand of equipment, the above is great, but the reality is a bit more complex since each brand has its own platform in the cloud.

It is extremely inconvenient to have to use several independent platforms from each other; with different interfaces and even worse, with different functionalities. To this is added that the company’s staff must be trained to handle the different platforms. What finally happens is that there are several clouds but, in the middle of that storm, none are used.