What is our primary use case?
HighByte Intelligence Hub is used to connect machines that measure different medical devices and their parts, which are engineering data. We install HighByte into a client PC and connect to that data through HighByte. We model it, contextualize it, and design the data pipelines. We publish to the MQTT broker. Then, at the downstream, we subscribe to that data through the HighByte gateway and feed that data to SPC software.
I decided to use HighByte for this because earlier we used to do point-to-point integrations, which would have taken ages in terms of time and energy consumption. Through HighByte, we are trying to make our MQTT or UNS a useful single source of truth. We publish all the data at the enterprise level, which includes different sites across the globe, and it should be real-time data. By using HighByte Intelligence Hub, we are overcoming the point-to-point integration problem, time consumption, and creating a single source of truth to the UNS.
Another important aspect of HighByte Intelligence Hub is that it supports different types of data and data types. Traditionally, with OSI Pi, for example, sharing data out of the AVEVA platform was tough. HighByte Intelligence Hub has made it easy to connect those integration platforms. Along with that, it also provides non-structured SQL database connections such as NoSQL databases and MongoDB, which has made our life easy.
What is most valuable?
HighByte Intelligence Hub's best features are data modeling and the different connections. You can go live literally within a few minutes from your client PC. The data pipelines are quite useful. It is quite flexible using JavaScript or JSON. Through JSON, you can customize the data pipeline if you have good insight into JavaScript. It is also very handy to contextualize data, filter out data, or change any configurations needed at the downstream.
These features have helped my team and it was pretty straightforward. HighByte Intelligence Hub is evolving with every version because every two to three months they upgrade their platforms. In the last two to three years, they have improved a lot. It is very easy compared to other tools such as OSIsoft or AVEVA Pi. Creating the tags and associating those tags with your incoming attributes is pretty straightforward.
HighByte Intelligence Hub also offers initializations as well, where you can twist your data models and tags. For example, if you want to filter out or filter any particular delimiters, you can do that. Then you can do the data mapping through the data instance and browse those tags directly into your data pipeline.
HighByte Intelligence Hub has impacted our organization positively. Earlier, those point-to-point integrations were done manually. Currently, it is fully automated. It has saved us time. Scalability is pretty straightforward and easy due to this. It has helped with traceability and the version control perspective. Finding things and mapping the correct tags is pretty useful using HighByte Intelligence Hub. For a traditional platform, if I were to consider going live, it would have taken six months. But once you get a good grip on HighByte Intelligence Hub, it would take around two to three weeks, hardly, to go live on your production machines.
What needs improvement?
At this moment, HighByte Intelligence Hub can be improved in several ways. It provides the inbuilt UNS, which is fine at the local level if you have limited capability or limited nodes connected to it. But as the number grows and is connected to the UNS or the MQTT broker, it won't work. Perhaps if they could come up with their native broker, that would be useful.
Secondly, sometimes the old versions do not support the new features' project export configuration. If I have new versions and I export the new version's configurations and try to import it, it won't work. That is another challenge because there is no other option other than updating your version and getting into the new version. Sometimes it is not possible due to company policy and team validation testing. Other than that, HighByte Intelligence Hub is straightforward.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using HighByte Intelligence Hub for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
HighByte Intelligence Hub is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
HighByte Intelligence Hub's scalability is pretty easy and straightforward. If the setup of your template is stable and your tags are stable, then it is pretty straightforward and you can scale it at the enterprise level without much difficulty.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support is pretty good, as they come back within a few hours, approximately three to four hours. The customer support is of high quality.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had a manual effort previously where we had to copy the pipe data from one server to another manually. Currently, it is totally automated. Everything is now automated and has made our life easy.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment as mentioned earlier. We have saved four to five months of time in production deployments. For the traceability, it is easy because everything is being automated. For the version control and the traceability perspective, we have the tags and the data mapping correctly, and the data is getting stored in SQL databases. It has made our life easy. From a scalability perspective, it is very useful. We are going to scale it in just a single day or two days maximum, whereas it would have taken months earlier. In this case, it is limited to a few days.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I feel the pricing, setup cost, and licensing are reasonable because they are offering a bundle. If you have multiple sites using HighByte Intelligence Hub, they offer some flexibility. They are charging reasonably well at this point in time, but going forward, I do not know what the pricing will be. If they increase the amount in the future, that would be another challenge.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing HighByte Intelligence Hub, I did evaluate other options, as Litmus was on our radar, but other than that, we did not have anything else.
What other advice do I have?
Regarding HighByte Intelligence Hub's governance and security, at this point in time, it does provide the SSL certificates for the inbuilt connections configurations. It takes time because you have to be on board with your internal IT teams and get things done. So far, we have limitedly used the SSL certificate. Their SMB connections need to be improved. It is currently fluctuating at this point in time. It is not that useful, so we are using the file server protocol mostly.
Regarding HighByte Intelligence Hub's AI capabilities and the accuracy and reliability of output, we have not used the AI agent in the pipeline yet because we are good at this point in time. It would be useful because they are also going to integrate with the i3 explorer, and it would be useful, but we have not explored the AI agent much.
My advice to others looking into using HighByte Intelligence Hub is to first use it, then trust it. I rate this product eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
