Our technology and applications have fundamentally changed the way devices and systems connect, integrate, and interoperate.
The shrinking cost and increasing capabilities of microprocessors has resulted in the proliferation of smart devices in buildings, machines, homes, cars, and commercial appliances. The growth of the Internet, the move toward energy deregulation, and the aggregation of facilities under a single owner or management company makes interconnectivity and control of diverse devices, including legacy systems, essential as a means to achieving greater operational efficiencies. The lack of standardization among these devices, however, has stood as a barrier to achieving this goal. By providing a cost effective solution for connecting and controlling disparate devices in a unified manner, Niagara unlocks the potential for new services and business opportunities.
Tridium's products offer compelling value to both end users and partners. For OEM and reseller partners, the Niagara Framework solves several key business challenges present in all control-related industries:
- High development costs associated with the foundation or infrastructure layer of software that communicates with devices and manipulates the data from them.
- The need to transfer information from real-time control processes into a homogeneous structure enabling enterprise and service applications.
- Integration of legacy systems to enable companies to easily migrate existing customers to new technologies and product offerings.
Partners who adopt the Niagara Framework eliminate substantial engineering effort and are able to focus on their core competencies of application development and marketing. These companies gain competitive advantage in their markets from lower development costs and quicker time-to-market.
NiagaraAX is a software framework and development environment that solves the challenges associated with building Internet-enabled products, device-to-enterprise applications and distributed Internet-enabled automation systems. NiagaraAX builds on the pioneering capabilities of Niagara R2, originally introduced in 1999, and the experience gained in deploying over 82,000 Niagara-based products operating in over 6,000 installations worldwide.Niagara R2 introduced the concept of a software framework that could normalize the data and behavior of diverse devices, regardless of manufacturer or communication protocol, to enable the implementation of seamless, Internet-connected, web-based systems. NiagaraAX takes that concept to the next level.
The core concept of Niagara is its unique, patented component model that transforms the data from diverse external systems into uniform software components. These components form the foundation for building applications to manage and control the devices. In Niagara R2, the component model focused primarily on modeling data from the various systems to create a uniform data set for applications. The NiagaraAXcomponent model goes beyond unifying protocols and data from diverse systems, to unify the entire development environment used to build applications.
The key requirements that guided the development of NiagaraAX included:
- Creating a uniform software environment and component model across all layers of the device-to-enterprise solution stack. This means that whether you are building a small controller or a comprehensive enterprise application, with NiagaraAX , developers work in the same programming environment with the same tools;
- Providing open APIs to all system services and an extensible component model that enable partners to develop their own applications, plug-ins and drivers independent of Tridium;
- Providing all-inclusive support for web-services data handling and communications with enterprise applications;
- Enabling large system scalability and a distributed processing architecture over any Internet, Intranet or Wireless network.
NiagaraAX provides the environment, tools and services to enable partners to develop products and applications quickly and easily.
In NiagaraAX, all of the APIs for internal system operations are available to developers. You can create your own applications, plug-ins, wizards and drivers completely with the Framework.
