ZigBee meets the IBM enterprise

Arcom and Ember have teamed to bridge industrial wireless mesh networks with IBM's Websphere environment.

Arcom and Ember have teamed to bridge industrial wireless mesh networks with IBM's Websphere environment.

Companies can now easily deploy ZigBee-based wireless sensor and control networks across their industries, supply chains or field operations and seamlessly link to their IBM enterprise systems, thanks to a technology partnership announced today between Ember and Arcom.

Arcom has integrated Ember's wireless semiconductors and software into its XScale based, industrial network gateways to provide communications between ZigBee networks and IBM's WebSphere MQ Integrator.

This partnership enables companies to save money by using low-power wireless mesh networks to, for example, monitor pipelines, control automation equipment or track perishable cargo, feeding the remote data directly into their IBM back-office applications.

The Arcom/Ember partnership solves one of the thorniest issues impeding the adoption of new wireless mesh technology in industrial applications; namely, making the data from remote sensors and controllers easy to integrate and useful to business applications, according to Arlen Nipper, Arcom's President.

"Bringing information from the field back to the enterprise through ZigBee networks will transform the way many industries do business", said Nipper.

"Information can be retrieved faster, more efficiently and at less cost".

"Ember's solution best addresses the low cost, low-power and standardisation requirements necessary for this technology to take off across the industrial world".

Arcom's industrial network gateway incorporates Ember's EM2420, the first wireless platform to combine a 2.4GHz radio transceiver chip with an embedded ZigBee-ready networking stack and development environment.

Ember's solutions support wireless mesh monitoring and management networks that automatically configure and heal themselves and work for years on very little power.

Arcom selected the Ember platform because it is a mature technology already proven in numerous real-world applications, as well as due to Ember's strong ZigBee experience.

Ember is a promoter of the ZigBee Alliance, and its semiconductor system is now National Technical Systems' (NTS) "Golden Suite" standard for evaluating IEEE802.15.4/ZigBee ready products for interoperability.

The Ember enabled industrial network gateway is powered by the Viper single board computer, a compact module based on the Intel 400MHz PXA255 XScale RISC processor.

This rugged industrial appliance uses embedded Linux combined with IBM's J2ME embedded Java product, offering a platform with integrated MQTT (telemetry transport) and device management support.

Combined with Ember's wireless technology, it provides an end-to-end telemetry communications gateway that pumps ZigBee network data from remote devices to IBM's publish and subscribe information broker, WebSphere MQ Integrator (WMQI).

The industrial network gateway can be linked to the enterprise network using a standard LAN connection, 802.11b Wi-Fi or via a digital cellular network.

From the broker, information can be distributed on a 'one-to-many' basis and delivered directly to multiple applications using the MQSeries messaging "middleware".

This solution supplies event-driven, real-time data to any application within the enterprise such as SAP-based ERP, billing, scheduling or even the trading floors.

Arcom is the latest in a growing list of OEMs and systems integrators to join Ember's partner programme.

Ember's ability to provide a complete ZigBee platform - chips, networking stack and application developer kit - enabled Arcom to bring the new wireless product to market in very short time.

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