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Making Legacy Smart; Bridging the Gap

What’s paradoxical about big business is a board level strife for disruption and progression matched with a lack of consideration to the cumbersome, ageing platforms propping up their back end.

The bigger a company gets the more computing power it needs and there’s just no getting around that in the modern world of business.
You may be in logistics, production, automotive, aviation or even banking, but the sooner you realise your company is as much about computing as it is its original purpose, the more you need to consider improving your systems.

Legacy systems at more established companies have been in place for years and trying to replace such deep rooted tech is expensive, time consuming and potentially disruptive to operations and there in lies the problem.

How do we improve systems without replacing them?

The answer is to work with legacy systems to make them smart but that’s usually easier said than done…

What are the main issues with legacy systems?

A lot of legacy systems, more often than not, don’t have network support. They use old serial interfaces which require hardware and also protocol support. The best way of getting around this is using industry standard (although legacy) protocols, rather than adopting and using your own proprietary protocols. For example, integrating with BACnet or Modbus/tcp.

Why are there compatibility issues with new tech?

While other systems may be compatible with a limited set of protocols, they do not feature the ability to integrate with a wide range of protocols and can not forward that data to the cloud. The Hark Hub in this case is a universal bridge, whereas other pieces of hardware perform a limited set of functions.

What makes Hark tech different?

We are able to integrate with legacy systems and protocols, as well as our own hardware and bring systems and “bits” of hardware up to modern standards by simply connecting them through our Hark Hub.

The Hark Hub has support for industry standard protocols and can be updated automatically to support new and old protocols that may not be available on it initially.

The Hark Hub provides an abstraction which allows us to deal with complex and/or non-standard protocols, seamlessly integrating them without requiring extra/new hardware or changes. We are able to integrate old hardware in to our cloud platform as if it was our own proprietary products and wireless protocols.

Navigating the hardware jungle

The biggest hurdle with customers is understanding what their legacy hardware is and what it has available to it. These pieces of hardware are usually old and customers are unsure of what their devices support.

Each piece of hardware tends to come with its own set of documentation. Even though these pieces of hardware support integration via an industry standard protocol, they’ll often differ in configuration and ways of working.

For example, one piece of hardware will have a different register ID in which it stores the current temperature value to the second piece of hardware.

Want to talk getting smart? Give us a call.

Andrew Hathaway
Andrew Hathaway

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