Mimik Technology

Mimik has developed an operating environment which allows virtually any smart device or sensor operating right out at the edge of the company network to directly contribute to the data and workflow of the business. This will usually be as one of a huge number of such devices all acting as creators of the baseline raw data of small process actions and outcomes. The majority of these devices have the capability to do much more than they’re doing today but lack the capabilities to deliver it upwards to applications and services that can accumulate, analyse, and assess that data and its business impacts.

Fig 1 – The Mimik operating environment

Many of these smart devices now, and all in future, will have sufficient IT resources to run workloads for many applications and do much of the processing of the data at source starting with preparing and formatting it appropriately. Increasingly, they will also have the ability to manage complex workloads in a duplex environment, where the device has sufficient resources to directly manage its processes and adjust them on command from further up the network chain of command eventually making these devices fully autonomous. It is this environment that mimik provides, using containerisation to provide a level of abstraction from the infrastructure at the extreme edge which is on the device where the data source is. It creates a serverless environment that couples with an API and micro-services-based runtime architecture to create edge services that run in exactly the same way as the back-end cloud services and can directly collaborate with each other and with Cloud, often using subsets or ‘lite’ versions of the same applications code.

This is the first element of a three-part design model. The second element is making it possible for that device (resource) to find other devices and communicate with them and form adhoc clusters. In this way, the collaborative environment required by the edge computing model can be built.

The third element is that, as that collaborative environment grows, the need for it to communicate up and down the ‘chain of command’ inherent in building an operational ‘whole’ right out to the edge becomes an imperative. This means being able to work within a ‘write code once, use it everywhere’ model where the same applications and orchestrations can be used from the individual edge devices right up into the cloud as it is currently understood, and back up the network. In practice, it gives users the ability to extend their cloud operations from the back office systems through to the smallest single sensor device a company uses.

Quotes

“Mimik is at the aha moment of cloud computing; the way I felt about Tesla or twilio in their early days.”
Cathie Wood, Founder and CEO, Ark-Invest

“Mimik is a key technology partner on our roadmap to deliver the cloud car and have solved the interoperability problem.”
Thomas Mueller, Chief Technology Officer, WIPRO

Instead of edge cloud computing representing yet another significant discontinuity, it will become a key part of a continuum from the smallest single sensor through to the largest cloud data center. It is part of a context-driven mesh, where devices can discover each other, test their communications capability and facilitate their own integration, driven by the context of the task or workload. From the mimik point of view, this can be considered as providing users with a Device-as-a-Service environment.

This company is targeting bringing the computational element of workflow as close as possible – both physically and logically -to where the application demand and the sources of data are located. The ultimate implementation of this goal is to make it possible for the devices producing the raw data to also run the application needed to process that data, communicate it to other applications and quite possibly manage, and change, the actions of the process the device is sensing or operating as an integral element.

The architecture allows forming device clusters based on three scopes: Network, Proximity, and Account. ‘Network’ means direct interconnection – be that in the same home attached to the same Wi Fi, or the same manufacturing facility attached to the corporate network. Here, there are a huge number of use cases where applications and devices need to communicate with each other.

‘Proximity’ refers to situations where a device needs to reach beyond the direct network within a given proximity to find the right resource, such as additional computation to process a specific workload, while ‘Account’ refers to devices or resources that may belong to associated accounts, but for which access is authorised.

This ability to mimic the cloud then leads to the next stage, the ability to start orchestrating the collaborations possible right out at the edge, using a ‘lite container’. This uses the same API semantics as Docker in order to ensure compatibility from within a cloud environment and seamlessly out to the edge. This allows existing cloud applications and services to be readily extended as far out into the edge as required.

This places mimik as a contender for the role of pan-network ‘glue’ providing the environment in which business processes can be developed. They can extend, as a single entity, from the sensors and controllers of, say, machine tools and other manufacturing systems, through local data aggregation and processing, and on to regional and finally central management and corporate back-office systems with, at each step, only the relevant data is forwarded up the chain of command. For example, there is no need for the back-office system to be informed that a specific machine tool continues to function well within tolerances. Any slippage close to tolerance will, however, be the kind of data that it is important to forward and eventually act upon.

Edge computing has the potential to provide businesses with the core toolset needed to build coherent, end-to-end management of their operations and processes, where one business decision can be transmitted and implemented at all appropriate points across the corporate network, and at appropriate times. For some businesses this will prove to be the essential groundwork needed to build fully – or at least widely – automated business and manufacturing processes with real-time control of all processes and their interaction, together with real-time reporting of all actions and results. For many others it will give them a data-rich understanding of how their business is running, where bottlenecks and other problems are starting to develop, what is working well etc.

The alternative is that businesses will find growth and business expansion increasingly difficult because without using technology like that provided by mimik they will always be confronted by disjointed, incomplete network architectures. This will mean that they either cannot pass data from the real ends of their networks through to the centre (and all necessary points in between) or that they have to self-engineer their own version of a data re-key-entry system.