iAugusta Systems has expanded the features of its EdgeFrontier middleware, which is used to connect with an array of non-IP, real-time data devices such as surveillance cameras, to more efficeintly collect and correlate the data it collects for use by other corporate applications, such as sensor monitoring or asset tracking.

Among the changes in EdgeFrontier 2.0 are two new applications to the product, EdgeFrontier Manager, running on a server, and EdgeFrontier Interface, running on a laptop. Interface lets a user directly configure and control Manager, which administers data collection, processing and correlation with endpoint devices, such as sensor or RFID nets, actuators, motion detectors and video cameras.

“Before, EdgeFrontier was sent up as an enterprise service bus with limited middleware features,” says Patrick Esposito, CEO for Augusta Systems, in Morgantown, W.Va. Customers had to use the company’s SensorBridge suite of prebuilt software components for integrating data from various sensors nets or other edge devices. “Now we can integrate this device data directly: you don’t need SensorBridge, and we eliminate software coding.”

Also part of Version 2.0 are more robust data processing and event correlation, as well as new data-distribution features, such as using messaging or writing data directly to native database formats.

Augusta has added some new management features, including being able to load-balance data processing across multiple EdgeFrontier servers at a single site.

“With 2.9, we have a complete middleware product that can handle an array of edge devices, so you don’t need separate middleware packages for each device type,” Esposito says. “And if already have those separate middleware packages, you can now use EdgeFrontier to integrate these together.”

In addition to EdgeFrontier and SensorBridge, which works with existing Microsoft development tools, Augusta also offers SensorPort, introduced in March 2007, an appliance that handles the processing of data drawn from these various data systems.

The entire product suite is designed to create a single framework that, in effect, homogenizing the data drawn from different types of data collectors, which may use different and proprietary protocols. That data can then be correlated and used by various enterprise applications. For example, EdgeFrontier makes it possible to see the relationship between alarms from adjacent motion detector as evidence of actual movement between points, rather than being triggered by a sheet of paper blown by a wind.