Beyond Kepware: 5 Ways NeuronEX Redefines Industrial Connectivity in Cloud + AI Agent Era
Neuron Team
Table of Contents
The AI Imperative: Why Traditional Industrial Gateways Are Falling Behind
We're in a new industrial revolution, fueled by cloud computing, big data, and AI. The rise of AI Agents is driving a new economic paradigm, making it essential for industrial enterprises to embrace the cloud. The public cloud offers not only state-of-the-art large models, rich development tools, and low-cost computing power, but more importantly, it provides an ecosystem where Agents can be rapidly developed, efficiently delivered, agilely iterated, and can reach a massive customer base. For industrial enterprises, adopting cloud and its AI capabilities is no longer an "option" but an "imperative" on the path to future smart manufacturing.
Today's factory managers are looking for far more than just a speed reading on an HMI screen. They are striving for:
- Predictive Maintenance: Predicting equipment health with AI models to avoid unplanned downtime before a failure occurs.
- Supply Chain Optimization: Combining real-time production data with ERP order data to dynamically adjust production rhythms.
- Energy Consumption Management: Intelligently scheduling the operation of high-energy-consuming equipment based on electricity tariffs and production loads.
- Quality Traceability: Using machine vision and sensor data to automatically detect minute defects and link the data to product batches.
All of these point to a core truth: data is no longer just an isolated monitoring metric; it is the lifeblood and fuel that drives intelligent decisions and business optimization.
This is where traditional data collection gateways like Kepware are becoming a "data bottleneck." While Kepware is excellent at industrial data collection and connectivity, its core mission is to "forward" data, not to "understand" or "add value" to it. In this new era of Cloud + AI, the industrial sector urgently needs a new edge data infrastructure that's cloud-native, intelligent, and open.
This is precisely why we created NeuronEX—it's not just a replacement for Kepware, but a future-oriented, transformative, next-generation industrial edge smart gateway.
NeuronEX: The Industrial Edge Brain Born for the Cloud + AI Era
NeuronEX is an Industrial Connectivity Gateway software designed for equipment data collection and edge intelligent analysis in the industrial sector. It is more than just a protocol converter; it is an intelligent data hub that integrates multi-source data fusion, edge stream processing, AI algorithm integration, and cloud-edge synergy.
Compared to traditional data collection gateways represented by KepwareEX, NeuronEX represents a generational leap forward in design philosophy and core capabilities.
How NeuronEX Redefines the Industrial Edge in 5 Aspects
Architecture: From Heavyweight Windows Applications to Cloud-Native, Lightweight Deployment
| The Traditional Way (Kepware) | The NeuronEX Revolution |
|---|---|
| A typical Windows desktop application with a large installation package, dependent on a specific operating system environment, and usually requiring manual installation, configuration, and maintenance. In scenarios of large-scale deployment and automated operations, it proves to be cumbersome and inefficient. | Extremely Lightweight: Developed based on C and the Actor model, with a startup memory footprint of less than 100MB. Its minimal resource consumption allows for easy deployment on resource-constrained edge hardware like small industrial PCs and edge gateways. Cloud-Native Deployment: Fully embracing containerization technology, NeuronEX provides an official Docker image and supports declarative deployment and automated management in container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes and K3s. This means you can deploy and scale thousands of edge nodes as quickly, reliably, and repeatably as you manage internet applications, achieving an order-of-magnitude improvement in operational efficiency. |
Core Value: The agility, scalability, and manageability brought by its cloud-native architecture are unparalleled by traditional architectures, completely solving the challenges of deploying and maintaining large-scale Industrial IoT projects.
Data Flow: From Closed OPC Islands to Open Data Highways
| The Traditional Way (Kepware) | The NeuronEX Revolution |
|---|---|
| Primarily provides data upwards via OPC-UA/DA. While OPC is an excellent standard in industrial automation, it is not a native protocol for cloud big data and AI platforms. Data often needs to be converted through multiple layers of middleware to be consumed by big data systems, resulting in complex links and increased latency. | Native Cloud Protocol Support: NeuronEX has rich built-in northbound applications, supporting seamless connection to major public cloud IoT platforms like Azure IoT Hub and AWS IoT Core, or various MQTT Brokers like EMQX, through the standard MQTT protocol. Direct Integration with the Big Data Ecosystem: With built-in northbound applications for Kafka, REST API, and more, NeuronEX can directly push edge data to a company's data lake, message queues, or any cloud/on-premise application, completely breaking down the data silos between OT and IT. Support for SparkplugB Specification: NeuronEX offers deep support for the SparkplugB specification, which is optimized for industrial scenarios. It enables automatic discovery of device online/offline status, automatic reporting of metadata, and definition of complex topologies—capabilities far beyond what a simple MQTT client plugin can offer. |
Core Value: NeuronEX uses modern data protocols common in IT and the internet, allowing industrial data to truly move from the factory's "local network" onto the enterprise's "data highway," enabling efficient and seamless flow from edge to cloud.
Data Sources: From Single-Source Device Collection to Multi-Source Data Fusion
| The Traditional Way (Kepware) | The NeuronEX Revolution |
|---|---|
| Focuses on collecting time-series data from industrial equipment like PLCs and CNCs, which is a "one-way" data collection process. | NeuronEX is a true edge data fusion platform. In addition to supporting over 100 industrial protocols, it can also proactively connect to and integrate data from various IT systems, including databases (like MES/WMS/ERP), Enterprise Service Buses (ESB), and RESTful APIs |
Core Value: This signifies a transformation in data processing. At the edge, you can correlate and enrich real-time temperature data from a PLC with current work order information from an MES database, creating "rich data" with complete business context before sending it to the cloud. This edge-side data fusion capability dramatically enhances the value of subsequent data analysis and AI applications.
Core Capabilities: From a "Data Pipe" to "Edge Intelligence"
| The Traditional Way (Kepware) | The NeuronEX Revolution |
|---|---|
| Essentially a "Data Pipe," responsible for moving raw data from one end to the other, untouched. All computation and analysis occur in the SCADA or higher-level systems. | Powerful Edge Stream Processing: An integrated, powerful SQL-based rule engine with over 160 built-in functions allows for real-time filtering, cleaning, normalization, window calculations, and smart alerts before data is reported. For example, you can easily implement rules like "only report data that has changed by more than 5%," "unify temperature units from different devices to Celsius," or "calculate the average pressure over the last minute." This not only significantly reduces unnecessary data transmission but also provides high-quality, structured data for cloud applications. Native AI/ML Algorithm Integration: It allows users to directly integrate and run AI/ML models developed in languages like Python and Go at the edge. Whether it's expert models based on industrial mechanisms or predictive models based on deep learning, they can all achieve low-latency inference within NeuronEX. More importantly, it perfectly supports the mainstream AI pattern of "cloud-based training, model delivery to the edge, and edge-based inference," empowering the edge with greater intelligence through synergy with powerful cloud AI capabilities. |
Core Value: NeuronEX pushes computation and intelligence to the closest point to the data source. It is no longer a passive pipe but an active "edge brain" capable of thinking and analyzing, enabling faster local decisions and more efficient data preprocessing.
Ecosystem Synergy: From Standalone Software to Seamless Cloud-Edge Synergy
| The Traditional Way (Kepware) | The NeuronEX Revolution |
|---|---|
| As a standalone local software, integration with cloud platforms often requires secondary development, with inherent shortcomings in identity authentication, unified management, and large-scale deployment. | Deep Cloud Platform Integration: NeuronEX was designed from the ground up with collaboration with major cloud vendors in mind. It can run as a module in Azure IoT Edge or AWS IoT Greengrass, allowing for unified deployment and management from the cloud. Enterprise-Grade Security Integration: It supports integration with services like Azure Active Directory and AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) for enterprise-level unified identity authentication and single sign-on, fitting perfectly into existing corporate IT security frameworks. |
Core Value: NeuronEX is not an isolated edge product but a natural extension of cloud strategy at the edge. It helps enterprises build a unified, secure, reliable, and highly collaborative cloud-edge integrated architecture.
Comparison Summary: Kepware vs. NeuronEX
| Feature Dimension | Kepware (Traditional Data Collection Gateway) | NeuronEX (Next-Gen Industrial Connectivity Gateway) |
|---|---|---|
| Core Architecture | Heavyweight Windows application, manual deployment | Lightweight, cross-platform, Cloud-Native (Docker/K8s) |
| Deployment & Ops | Difficult to scale, high operational costs | Agile, scalable, and supports automated operations |
| Data Interfaces | Primarily OPC-UA/DA, for industrial control | MQTT/Kafka/API, native to cloud and big data |
| Data Capabilities | Single-source device collection | Multi-source data fusion (devices + IT systems) |
| Intelligent Processing | Raw data forwarding (Data Pipe) | Edge stream processing + AI/ML model integration (Edge Brain) |
| Ecosystem Integration | Standalone local software | Seamless cloud-edge synergy (Azure/AWS), enterprise-grade SSO |
Conclusion
NeuronEX provides a solid data foundation for industrial digital transformation through its cloud-native architecture, open data ecosystem, powerful edge intelligence, and seamless cloud-edge synergy. Choosing NeuronEX means choosing a more agile, intelligent, and scalable future, allowing your industrial data to truly become the core engine driving your business growth.
Try NeuronEX for free： https://www.emqx.com/en/try?tab=self-managed