Industrial Ethernet/ “Internet of Things” Is it About putting Data in the Cloud? Or Interactivity?

Sorry for missing last week, time seems short when on the road with short flights.

As I fly the final leg home after a month on the road many brainstorming multi day workshops around different strategic thinking, but without a doubt the “Internet of Things’ applied in industrial/ manufacturing space brought up many ideas and many questions.

Certainly the discussion of “Cloud” vs “Internet of things” is it about getting to data from all types of devices and making that more available? Certainly that is one case, but certainly it is not a compelling case.

The “Internet of things” is about self-configuring devices, these could instruments, motors trucks, and mobile devices, fixed and roaming devices. Too many of you the IOT definition I believed was clear, but the workshops showed the confusion between taking and existing industrial application to the “Cloud” connecting through safe but tradition device integration paradigms, vs an interactive “self-configuring” environment of devices and systems, that is a new device integration, management paradigm.

Also, it is important to note it is not just about gathering data from devices to the cloud, and exposing it, the real opportunity comes in the interaction between devices, that the environment make the devices “self-aware” and able to interact. A natural example is that mobile devices of a roaming user is interacting with the other devices in the immediate area. Enabling interacting, and constant awareness and warnings of the current environment state, relative to a stability, and safety. Combine this with ever increasing transformation to managing Operational work vs monitoring, where the “work” or “activity” includes the information, action in the context of “activity”.

The fact that a device is now “self-configuring”, so you can from an IOT system “discover” the devices out there and configure the co-ordination system in the cloud, making other systems aware of them. This is a clear case for segments that are physically distributed such as cities, airports, upstream gas fields, mining, pipelines etc. Where the cost of aligning the devices has been too expensive, now with wireless but even more 4G networks like we seeing in the remote “Pilbara” region on Western Australia, the opportunity for plug and play devices that are “edge/ GPRS” enabled, and IOT enabled can be discovered, configured and aligned. As devices are swapped in and out no matter site the size, the configuration moves from an instrumentation job to anyone. This frictionless experience is key in configuration/ and sustaining. The increased speed of systems, decisions and agility required drives up complexity of systems, but this cannot drive up lifecycle cost, and this can only go away through Self Configuration, enablement of anyone to enable the system to run, this become clear as the key requirement of the IOT.

The chart below shows the expected industry segments to adopt, many are well engaged.

But why is there a slow take up, mainly I believe to unawareness, lack of understanding, and readiness? But this is changing, the IOT platforms are coming on to the market that will drive down the cost of achieving IOT, but it will still be a journey. The diagram below shows from one of the workshops the key challenges in adoption, I expect these to fall away fast over the next 2 to 3 years. I cannot see how we going achieve the agility, with the dynamic market, operational workforce at a sustainable cost that is reasonable without this paradigm shift, to IOT as interactive landscape. In the many sessions I held with end users, engineers and people across the company and industry, the real initial opportunity is not in the big plants it is in the “collaborative Industrial Landscape” of small plants and assets aligning with people and processes.

 Certainly the interest, like cloud is growing, and the infrastructure is maturing that this will be reality in helping to addressing the modern industrial landscape challengers in a very different landscape than we had in 90s, 2000s, and 2010s, I will discuss more on this fundamental event next week.

Momentum grows on Internet of Things in Industrial and Manufacturing Environment

As I enter another week of brainstorming workshops across Schneider Software, with thought leaders, we are working through innovations on technology, architecture and process. Centered around the “cloud” and “Internet of things” while we have offerings happening in both areas, we need shift from offerings to these technologies be a natural part of the industrial architecture and process of buying and applying an industrial solution. I also spoke with many people over the last 2 weeks across the world not about technology but about the solution challengers and it was clear that the three main challengers kept coming up:

•  People and operational change of moving to teams which involved remote workers and virtual experts
•  Agility to change production, and process quickly and efficiently
•  Holistic control across the manufacturing industrial assets. This required the expansion to   assets that could be mobile or remote to traditional industrial plant, yet still are apart of Value Chain that they are accountable.

Accountability came up over and over again; this means different things from a safety of people to food safety so trace ability etc to efficiency and responsibility to the environment and impact. It was clear in all the discussions that a change in thinking of architecture and approach was needed but instead of its being a “dream” it is really possible today in a sustainable way using such technologies as Cloud and Internet of Things. The architecture below is an example of distributed, but needing a unified operational experience across roles across devices, and unifying devices.

Also during the week I came across two articles one from Microsoft and another from ARC on Hanover fair both supporting the increased momentum in the market for Internet of Things.

Key as MS  points out below the opportunity to investigate and improve your business by naturally looking beyond the traditional architectures, overcoming the concerns such as security, by implementing secure architectures and approaches “that does not mean isolation”.   

The Operational Transformation is here from a design point of view, again this is one of the technologies and approaches to be employed to achieve the operational workspace and efficiency required in the flat world.