Done right, the digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises has less to do with plugging in smart objects to collect data from the factory floor. ​ Rather, it has a lot to do with laying down a reliable, secure, and scalable data processing infrastructure in such a manner that it allows you to automate your entire manufacturing business process. ​ And for engineers and architects tasked with building IIoT solutions, it involves picking the right tools for each part of your data processing pipeline, from the edge of the network to systems at the highest level of your enterprise. ​ To understand why and how to achieve that using open source tools, I had a conversation with Jeremy Theocharis who is the Co-Founder and CTO of United Manufacturing Hub, a company centered around an Open Source Project that combines state-of-the-art IT/OT tools to help engineers build Industrial IoT solutions. ​ Here's the outline of our conversation which you can watch by clicking on the link below: ​ Outline: Challenges in IT/OT Integration  Introduction to United Manufacturing Hub (UMH)  Why Open Source Matters  Criteria for picking the core technologies for the UMH stack.  Modernising Industrial Systems Architecture Using Microservices  Why MQTT and Kafka for the IIoT Data Pipeline  The role played by OPC UA in the UMH stack  Unified Namespace Architectural Approach  Factors influencing the design of the UMH DataModel  Multisite Data Integration Using UMH  Machine Vision Use Cases on the UMH Platform  Historian vs Open-Source databases

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