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This week I had the opportunity to host a panel on the state of the Industrial Internet at Web Summit. My two panelists were Said Tabet from EMC and Joe Salvo from GE. They are both heavily involved in the development of the IoT industry through their work on standards bodies, industry consortiums, and their roles at EMC and GE respectively. I will document the key points of our discussion in the next two posts. The Internet of Things (IoT) was one of the top subjects at Web Summit this year. The commercial application of IoT in particular it will bring massive cost reductions from many small efficiency improvements in jet engine, and power generation efficiency improvements that will add up to trillions of dollars of cost reduction and quality of life improvements. We started out the discussion with Dr. Salvo explaining the difference between IoT and the Industrial Internet. Essentially IoT originated from RFID and is primarily the network connection of single purpose sensors. The Industrial Internet is focused on the connection of intelligent devices where there is local intelligence on the device. The connectivity allows the individual device to leverage the intelligence of the rest of the devices to be smarter. For example an aircraft engine is now capturing data, analyzing it, and making near real time adjustments to maximize its performance. When the engine is connected to the Industrial Internet it is able to take advantage of entire community of engines to improve it’s efficiency and proactively plan adjustments based on things like weather condition data available via the Industrial Internet. Several recent technology advances are enabling the exploding growth of the Industrial Internet. The easy availability of ubiquitous compute through cloud computing. This has fueled the explosion in the collection, and processing of data across the globe and the rapid expansion in new software development. New analytics technologies (i.e. Spark, Splunk!) have emerged that are optimized to analyze streams of data in near real time as well as analyze massive stores of data to make better predictive decisions. Finally the cost reduction in sensors for a few pennies has allowed a massive number to be deployed with each device. For example, each GE Wind Turbine deployed today has several thousand sensors embedded. The more sensors deployed mean more data, and the more intelligent the device. The more intelligent the device the more efficient it will operate, enabling many small operating cost savings that will add up to millions of dollars a year. The Industrial Internet has arrived. The cost savings, and quality of life benefits are being realized today. Consumers are being conditioned to expect functionality that can only be delivered by making devices smarter and more self aware to optimize themselves and able to participate in the Industrial Internet to contribute and leverage the collective knowledge of the larger community. In my next post I will review the societal impacts of the Industrial Internet. |
