Why centralized edge management is becoming business-critical
In modern industrial environments, intelligent edge devices are increasingly taking over AI, vision, and control tasks directly on the local device. However, as the device fleet grows, complexity increases: hardware, software, AI models, networking, and remote management must be able to connect into a scalable, overall solution. When companies decide to roll out intelligent edge devices, this ties up development resources, increases operational risks, and can extend time-to-market.
SECO's Clea OS addresses this challenge by providing a central software foundation for industrial edge applications. The software platform supports intelligent device setup, deployment, and management through a consistent environment, making it easier for developers to quickly scale, implement, and maintain secure industrial edge applications.
Centralized software management: Challenges and Benefits
In many companies, established structures based on classic or production Information Technology (IT), machine controllers, and cloud platforms often limit interoperability between systems. As a result, trying to mix formerly siloed IT and Operational Technology (OT) environments make them difficult to maintain, scale, update, and expand with new functionality.
For example, devices, interfaces, machine data, and applications can only connect through a considerable initial effort of integration, tying up company resources – which can become expensive if work is outsourced. In addition, networked edge devices depend on a clean platform architecture, require high standards for “security by design,” and require clearly defined DevOps and update processes.
Clea OS provides standardization across edge devices that can be deployed, configured, and maintained simply and uniformly. Edge-based applications can be centrally orchestrated, versioned, and rolled out specifically to individual devices or device groups. This accelerates rollouts and OTA updates, reduces manual intervention, and improves maintainability during ongoing operations.
At the same time, central management and logging functions facilitate auditing and support compliance requirements. For developers, this means reproducible deployments and less integration effort. Technical decision-makers, in turn, benefit from lower operating costs, better scalability, and controllable security risks.
Clea OS as the central industrial operating system foundation
With Clea OS, developers receive a Yocto-based, open, and customizable software platform for industrial embedded and edge systems. It provides a flexible foundation for tailoring operating system images to hardware, drivers, interfaces, and application requirements.
At the same time, it supports different hardware architectures, especially Arm and x86, and thereby facilitates deployment across heterogeneous device fleets. Thanks to the high level of modularity, support can also be extended to additional architectures and embedded modules that were not developed by SECO. In addition, Clea OS’s extensive support for Silicon Vendors Evaluation Kits and Raspberry Pi platforms enables developers to evaluate, prototype, and validate specific use cases even outside the SECO hardware ecosystem before scaling them into industrial edge deployments.
A central advantage of the platform lies in the reproducibility of the software foundation. Versioned builds, consistent system configurations, and defined dependencies help to better align development, test, and production environments. This reduces sources of error and makes deployments easier to plan.
Developers can begin their development with Clea OS on a robust foundation. This allows them not only to develop industrial AIoT applications, but also to test, deploy, operate, and maintain them across the entire lifecycle. Clea OS thus creates the basis for scalable edge platforms that are both technically flexible and capable of operating reliably over the long term.
Use Case: Camera-based solder joint monitoring on PCBs
One possible application scenario for Clea OS is camera-based solder joint monitoring directly in the production line, where an edge device captures image data from PCBs directly at the machine via connected cameras. To avoid having to transfer the data to a cloud first, the analysis takes place locally on the device. In this way, an AI model can detect defects, deviations, or quality issues at solder joints almost in real time.
The technical foundation is Clea OS, which provides the operating system and runtime basis on which industrial edge applications can be reliably executed. Building on this, the SECO Application Hub supports selecting, deploying, and managing suitable applications or machine learning (ML) models on edge devices for vision, audio, and speech applications. For the actual model and workflow logic, Clea Studio AI comes into play: Developers can use it to visually create and connect AI workflows from input, model, and output blocks and validate them with real camera or video data.
The interaction of Clea OS, SECO Application Hub, and Clea Studio AI creates an end-to-end process: Clea OS operates the device, the Application Hub delivers and manages the appropriate application or AI model, and Clea Studio AI enables the configuration, validation, and operationalization of the workflow. This turns a single vision use case into a scalable, maintainable edge AI solution for industrial quality control.
Deployment, Updates, and Security
Building on the above use case, one can see that the actual challenge does not end with initial application deployment. As soon as AI models, camera software, or analytic workflows run productively on multiple edge devices, companies must continue to update, secure, and manage them regularly and trace transactions.
This is exactly where over-the-air (OTA) updates become a central building block. Software versions can be updated quickly, in a controlled manner, and remotely without having to maintain each device manually. In conjunction with Clea OS, developers can manage devices remotely via Clea framework, including secure OTA updates, monitoring, and remote access.
End-users may value updating speed but securing the entire update process is of primary concern. Secure mechanisms reduce risks for ongoing operations and support traceable lifecycle management. For Clea, SECO offers fleet management, device monitoring, secure OTA updates, versioning, rollback, and lifecycle management of containerized applications.
In addition, the SECO Cyber Security Package addresses regulatory and technical security requirements. It runs on Clea OS and supports OEMs in compliance topics, for example, in meeting the requirements of the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the Radio Equipment Directive (RED). This includes, among other things, OS-level security, Secure Boot, vulnerability management, Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) transparency, and auditability.
DevOps integration and Scaling
After deployment, updates, and security, the question surfaces in how industrial edge applications can be further developed and scaled efficiently over the long term. For developers, Clea OS, with its open Yocto basis, offers a flexible foundation for adapting system architecture, images, and dependencies to specific hardware and application requirements. As a Linux distro based on the Yocto LTS project, it can be used for multiple hardware architectures and industrial embedded systems.
For project managers and technical decision-makers, this creates a reproducible operating framework for rollouts, maintenance, versioning, and rollbacks that can be standardized instead of being set up from scratch for each device or application. Clea OS supports end-to-end fleet management, device status monitoring, secure OTA updates, versioning, rollbacks, and lifecycle management of containerized applications.
The DevOps infrastructure with its Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) strategies thus becomes the connecting element between development, testing, deployment, and operation of intelligent edge applications. It facilitates the continuous further development, validation, and deployment of industrial AIoT applications. At the same time, decision-makers can reduce integration effort, operating costs, and compliance risks because device and application management are brought together on a single, scalable platform.
Conclusion
Through the interaction of operating system foundation, application deployment, AI workflow development, and lifecycle management, an end-to-end approach emerges from development through productive operation. Clea OS, the SECO Application Hub, and Clea Studio AI together form an integrated software foundation for industrial edge devices. The platform accelerates setup, deployment, and application management and can thus shorten time-to-market for AIoT projects.
Contact SECO and learn how Clea OS can advance your industrial edge application.