New Technology Incubator for the Industrial Internet

Real-Time Innovations (RTI) announced RTI Labs, a free program for customers that provides early access to new technology developed for the IIoT. Customers who take advantage of RTI Labs have the opportunity to optimize their IIoT systems with advanced technical capabilities and potentially influence the RTI product roadmap.

RTI Labs is a mutually beneficial program, fostering open communication and collaborative efforts between customers and RTI technical teams. The program grants end-users insight and access to experimental and complementary software projects, downloads, tools, and the chance to provide feedback to RTI engineers and product managers. With the introduction of this program, RTI has created a mechanism to share the full range of RTI-developed technologies at various development stages, allowing software developers to increase their knowledge and efficiency when architecting IIoT systems of systems, and to reduce the time, effort and resources spent on creating alternative solutions.

RTI Labs includes:

Detailed project descriptions, links to relevant content and documentation, tutorials and videos. It also provides users with the current status of these projects, insight into future plans and notifications of any updates. Users are encouraged to evaluate various aspects of the program and submit feedback directly to the RTI technical team.

This feedback will be considered while prioritizing updates and features to include in future product releases, creating a unique customer service dynamic that delivers immediate value to the end-user, providing free technical resources and know-how, and the opportunity to directly influence technology crucial to their IIoT system enablement. It also empowers RTI with insights into evolving customer needs as the company develops RTI Connext DDS for future IIoT systems.

RTI Labs launches with three new experimental projects:

• RTI Connector for Connext DDS: A quick and easy way to access the power and functionality of Connext DDS from a variety of different scripting languages, such as Python, JavaScript and Lua. It allows developers to leverage these languages, which are often used to create test suites, to simulate incomplete or unavailable system components, and for rapid development.
• RTI System Designer: Allows users to graphically configure a system that uses Connext DDS. This includes the topics of data being exchanged, the schema for each and the Quality of Service (QoS) offered by each publisher and required by each subscriber. RTI System Designer enables system architects to design and configure their IIoT systems through a graphical interface and eliminates the need to hand-write textual configuration files. It also provides a guided configuration experience that makes it easy to learn Connext DDS concepts.
• RTI Cloud Discovery Service: Provides a discovery mechanism that can be used in environments that do not support multicast, as is sometimes the case with public cloud services and firewalls. In these instances, applications can use RTI Cloud Discovery Service to register their presence and look up their peers. Because the service is only used for discovery and not to broker run-time data exchange, it does not impact system latency, throughput, reliability or resilience.

“Our number one priority as a company is going above and beyond in our customer support and relationships, which was the driving force behind the creation of RTI Labs,” said Jan Van Bruaene, vice president of engineering at RTI. “We encourage our customers to engage with our engineers and speak openly about their unique experiences and processes in implementing our products. This feedback is invaluable and enables us to continue improving the utility of our products and contribution to our customers’ success. We are proud of the user community we have built at RTI and recognize our users’ impact in solidifying our role as a leader in IIoT connectivity software.”

RTI Labs is free of cost and available as of now. RTI will be adding additional experimental projects to the program within the next few months, including a feedback mechanism and additional tutorials and videos to support product downloads.

For more information on RTI Labs, please visit: www.rti.com/labs