What does an iconic engineering company that prides itself on being at the cutting edge of innovation do when it wants to raise the bar? Delve deeper into experience! Taking advantage of technological platforms, Rolls-Royce (R-R) – a global leader in high-performance power systems engineering and aircraft engine manufacturer - is capturing valuable performance data in order to improve service and develop new products.

Supporting this ambitious project is the TCS Connected Universe Platform (TCUP), an IoT platform that helps customers quickly develop and deploy IoT applications. TCS will provide R-R IoT digital platform capability, allowing data to be captured, shared, and analyzed more quickly across the organization so that new products and services can be introduced at pace. This will enable R-R to use data to innovate within all of its businesses and collaborate more effectively with partners and customers.

Nurtured by the Incubation wing of the Research and Innovation unit of TCS, the TCUP team started working on IoT solutions towards the end of the last decade — a typical example of the future-facing thinking the company invests in. At a time when IoT technologies were at a nascent stage, the TCUP team identified their potential and started work to translate the concept into a technological solution. And instead of a solution for a single vertical, TCS created a comprehensive, integrated, and horizontal enterprise-grade platform. Says Neil Crockett, Chief Digital Officer at Rolls-Royce, “The TCS IoT platform will allow us to take advantage of fast-paced data innovation.”

Years of intensive research in the technical requirements of IoT applications has enabled TCS to create a platform solution that not only meets current requirements, but is also future-ready. Some of the distinctive features of TCUP include:

Cloud and InPremise: Unlike many cloud-based IoT platforms, TCUP offers in-premises deployment, which Rolls-Royce needed. It uses container technology that allows unprecedented portability across the cloud, in-premises infrastructure, and the functionality to handle hybrid operations as well.

Accelerated time-to-market: The ready-to-use platform reduces development time by 50%. This also brings down the cost of development and deployment of IoT applications. In addition, it is architected for performance – the platform’s scalable and secure microservices-based architecture ensures that it will meet future performance needs, even as the numbers of devices, users, and applications grow.

Enterprise systems integration: As an IoT platform, TCUP can integrate with enterprise systems with ease using a comprehensive suite of APIs and integration options provided out of the box.

End-to-end device management: TCUP provides end-to-end device management, including device monitoring, management, remote configuration, and over-the-air upgrades.

Analytics support: TCUP provides R-R the ability to run streaming analytics, batch-oriented analytics (including machine learning tasks), and data processing pipelines, and create dashboards and visualizations.

For over nine months, TCS worked closely with the Rolls-Royce team to evaluate TCUP’s features and assess how those would be relevant to the engineering major. These market-leading and future-ready features eventually convinced Rolls-Royce that TCUP was the right choice for its ambitious digital initiative.