The establishment of Rajant in the tragic events after 9/11 formed its foundation as a company sensitive to the importance of mission-critical communications (MCX), Sagar Chandra, Executive Vice President for Global Sales and Marketing said in a recent conversation centering on the value Edge processing can bring to the MCX industry.

“Rajant was born out of a question, and a need to improve communication,” Chandra explained, “a way to maintain communication when key infrastructure points fail.”
Since the company was first established, Rajant’s customers are in a variety of industries such as mining, agriculture, ports, oil and gas and construction, and the company provides them with real-time connectivity where traditional connectivity technologies like Wi-Fi and LTE struggle or even fail.
Edge processing’s role in MCX
Edge computing’s ability to process data closer to the ‘edge’, i.e. on the device, has yielded advantages such as faster processing – a feature that is inevitably attractive to industries reliant on MCX.
What attracted Rajant to Edge computing?
“It started with the vision of our CEO Bob Schena,” said Chandra. “He saw certain needs but [there were] no efficient solutions in the industry. For example, if you wanted to have Edge processing that incorporates connectivity or AI, a company would have to buy the server, hire software engineers and purchase third-party devices like Wi-Fi or radio … basically many years of work.
“All of these separate components exist in the market. It’s just a question of having it all integrated. One box, one hub. That’s all that was missing.”
In response to this perceived gap in the market Rajant launched Cowbell: an all-in-one computing hub that can be used by data-intensive systems.
Why Edge computing and not Cloud computing? According to Chandra, this is due to multiple reasons: security concerns with data in the Cloud, immediate access to data, lack of connectivity to cloud, cost of connectivity to the Cloud.
“There are a lot more sensors that provide a lot of data, but say you need it pinged every 10 seconds, or every second … What’s happening is you have information that needs to be analysed very quickly, and by sending it to the Cloud you’re losing precious seconds.
“We’re talking [about] milliseconds, and Rajant has always worked in this world of milliseconds.” This returns to Rajant’s fundamental understanding of MCX and their customers’ requirements.
On the debate of Cloud computing versus Edge computing, Chandra said: “Cloud is still there. Edge computing is gaining more popularity because of a few things. One [is] security … The second thing is a lot of [our] industrial customers are in a remote location. Trying to find a way to send it [data] to the Cloud is not possible … The third thing is that if you have high bandwidth or high latency … Edge computing becomes a lot more appealing than sending data to the Cloud.”
For industrial customers working in oil and gas, for example, receiving information every 15 minutes is too late – and as a result, a handful of customers are holding off from investing in IoT tied to Cloud computing.
“Industrial IoT is on an upwards trend and everybody’s investing … For a majority of customers, that’s not going to deter them, but I do have examples where they’re saying, ‘Why would I do this? Why am I going to collect terabytes of data if I cannot make informed decisions in a timely manner?’”
Cowbell
Onto Rajant’s Cowbell solution. It was first launched at CES 2024 and is an Edge computing hub platform-as-a-service. It is a hardware device with built-in software and wireless connectivity that allows Rajant’s customers to connect to other sensors and third-party IoT devices, perform data analysis and enable transmission of this to the appropriate stakeholders. A customer can connect cameras for safety or security access; sensors, Rajant’s own wearable devices or any third-party such as an Apple watch, can be connected to the Cowbell hub.

In essence, Rajant enables connectivity, messaging and managing of data with their hub so their customers can retrieve the information from sensors and make informed decisions.
“We’ve had interest from the medical field,” Chandra explained. “I’m talking about hospitals that track sensors that you can imagine are tracking and monitoring individuals like the staff, the nurses, the patients … Even animal farms in the US. We have a strong relationship with a facility where their focus is finding sick animals and removing them from the herd before they infect others.”
The hub – Cowbell – itself is slightly bigger than a laptop and is deliberately designed to be portable so it can be taken into a variety of different environments – with the mind that it can handle different environments. “What we’ve come up with is a solution that can be used to improve safety of employees in hazardous working conditions such as a flare zone in oil and gas or a sub-zero warehouse environment or working around containers in a port.
The solution reflects a wider awareness that industrial IoT is only going to grow and seek out the solutions that serve its needs best.
“It’s not just about buying more sensors,” Chandra stressed. “If you think like that you’re missing the rest of the process … you need to think, how will I get information? Not data, but information, so you can make decisions.”
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