HighByte Briefing Note
Axendia was briefed by Torey Penrod-Cambra, Co-Founder & Chief Communications Officer, and Jeffrey Schroeder, Product Manager, at HighByte, a software company that was founded in 2018 by industrial automation veterans from Kepware. HighByte’s flagship product, HighByte Intelligence Hub, is an edge-native, no-code middleware solution that aims to address the need for secure, contextual data integration across complex industrial environments.
Enterprise-Grade Architecture for Complex Environments
HighByte has been focused on the core pain points hindering digital transformation in manufacturing: architectural complexity, fragmented data systems and the IT-OT divide.
The HighByte Intelligence Hub enables companies to model, contextualize and deliver data from disparate sources (PLCs, CMMS, historians, ERP, MES) to cloud and enterprise applications. Penrod-Cambra explains that “Rather than relying on costly custom code or point-to-point integrations, HighByte promotes a scalable hub-and-spoke architecture that provides agility and maintainability over time. The platform supports integration with enterprise systems like AWS and Snowflake, with the intention of making it easy for OT teams working at the edge.”
As for their ideal customer profile, Penrod-Cambra states, “We work mostly with midsize to large manufacturers because they tend to have the messiest architectures, and that’s where we can be the most valuable. Educating the market around the hub and spoke model has been a challenge because the industry has traditionally been focused on automation, the Purdue model and the ISA 95 stack of moving data from level 0 to 5. The introduction of more IT players like Snowflake and AWS into these environments has really shaken things up. And that’s why we have such strong partnerships with the cloud providers – we’re really enabling clients to have access to a whole new set of data that they didn’t have access to before – curated plant floor data.”
According to Penrod-Cambra, “We can’t send raw plant floor data to Snowflake [see “Data Access” in the figure below], so HighByte’s mission is helping companies model the data at the edge to make it usable as an Enterprise Scale payload,” [as shown below on the right]. Schroeder states that by transforming raw industrial data into structured, usable payloads, HighByte helps manufacturers standardize operations across geographically and technologically diverse sites.
Enabling Data-Ops for Life Sciences and Regulated Industries
With deployments in 24 countries and across a range of industries, HighByte is focused on helping manufacturers scale digital transformation initiatives and make industrial data AI-ready. The company continues to gain traction in pharmaceutical and life sciences, where volume constraints, patent cliffs, and perceived validation and compliance requirements make legacy systems difficult to modernize. As middleware, it acts as an abstraction layer, mitigating the need to “rip and replace,” which is especially critical in brownfield environments. By exposing secure Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and integrating with complex data sources (bioreactors, lab instruments, file servers), Penrod-Cambra explains that, “HighByte supports both real-time and batch data flows aligned with MES and cloud workflows. We’ve recently entered into a partnership with Körber to integrate with their MES, PAS-X, something our clients have been really excited about,” says Penrod-Cambra.
According to Penrod-Cambra and Schroeder, these REST APIs effectively turn the Intelligence Hub into a REST data server—making contextualized industrial data available to external systems using standard web protocols. This allows client applications to securely read or write data over HTTP using structured formats such as JSON, facilitating integration with modern cloud and enterprise platforms (e.g., process equipment, bioreactors, lab instruments, file servers). HighByte supports both real-time and batch data flows aligned with MES and cloud workflows.
The solution’s value is not just in data collection, but in orchestration, quality, governance and contextual modeling. This is especially important for customers dealing with heterogeneous landscapes and compliance-sensitive use cases, such as predictive maintenance, batch traceability or sustainability reporting. Penrod-Cambra states, “We’re talking to enterprise architects, solution architects, manufacturing and IT. And it’s a top-down motion because these teams are thinking, ‘How do we connect the infrastructure across all of our plants?’ It’s not at all a plant level decision.”
Penrod-Cambra goes on to say, “If someone came to us and didn’t want to involve operations, or didn’t want to involve quality or maintenance, or other teams that will ultimately either be working with the software or benefiting from it, then that’s a red flag for us. We want teams that are committed to collaborating on digital transformation projects.”
Built for Scale and Speed
HighByte’s DataOps capabilities are focused on four pillars: orchestration, observability, data quality and governance. Features such as pipeline creation, model validation, versioning and role-based access control are all designed with industrial applications in mind.
“What is interesting,” Schroeder states, “Is we often have to reemphasize to clients that we don’t store data. We don’t visualize data. We don’t analyze data. We move data and we move it with purpose. And for those who have swapped out applications and data sources over time, they think this is great because it ensures the efficient, contextual movement of data between systems — enabling AI-readiness, cost optimization and operational agility.”
The goal is for enterprise customers to be able to rapidly deploy and scale the HighByte solution that typically starts with a lighthouse project and expands to enterprise-wide standardization. The company’s strong partnerships with Deloitte, Cognizant, AWS and Snowflake reflect its strategic positioning at the intersection of industrial operations and cloud transformation.
In Brief
HighByte has recognized the need for industrial middleware that addresses the challenges experienced across a variety of verticals, including complex, regulated industries like pharma. With a flexible, no-code platform designed for both OT and IT users, the intention of the HighByte Intelligence Hub is to make data contextualization and delivery frictionless, scalable and fast, especially for challenges around tech transfer, AI adoption and brownfield modernization.
We will continue to provide updates on HighByte as they become available.
Related Content:
- Adopting Manufacturing Innovation to Improve Quality and Accelerate Time to Market
- Data is the New Battlefied
- An Integrated Approach to Reliability and Energy Centered Maintenance Optimization in Life Sciences
- Unlocking the Power of Data to Accelerate Time to Market
Stay Connected with Axendia!
Stay at the forefront of innovation and technology in life sciences, healthcare, and space-enabled research by connecting with Axendia.
- Follow us on LinkedIn: Join our professional network and stay updated on the latest insights, trends, and case studies. Connect with Axendia on LinkedIn
- Subscribe to Our Updates: Get exclusive insights and thought leadership articles delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for our newsletter
- Share Your Thoughts: We’d love to hear from you! Contact us to discuss your ideas, challenges, or opportunities. Email Axendia
Let’s drive innovation together!
Ready to unlock new opportunities and drive success? Schedule an Analyst Inquiry
The opinions and analysis expressed in this post reflect the judgment of Axendia at the time of publication and are subject to change without notice. Information contained in this post is current as of publication date. Information cited is not warranted by Axendia but has been obtained through a valid research methodology. This post is not intended to endorse any company or product and should not be attributed as such.