Smart Industry sparks IIoT enlightenment

Oct. 19, 2016
Second annual Putman Media event gathers manufacturers, leaders and innovators for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) revolution.

For the second year, more than 250 attendees came together for the Smart Industry 2016 conference on Sept. 26-28 in Chicago, where they learned valuable skills for developing, organizing and profiting from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and its supporting software and technologies.

[sidebar id =1]In his opening keynote address, Joe Sinfield, senior partner at management consultant Innosight, told users to they must understand the evolving IIoT ecosystem to extract value from it. This means replacing long product lifecycles with fast technical changes, and eliminating a few long design cycles in favor of many shorter design cycles. He also advised offering solutions and services instead of individual devices, pricing outcomes rather than equipment and parts, and focusing on business models instead of technologies.

“IIoT enables new model and new customer value propositions,” says Sinfield. “Despite the complexity, there are actions you can take now. Think out in time to assess future customer circumstance-based jobs, think broadly to determine who’s pursuing the same jobs you are, assess the potential for your offerings to be commoditized, ask yourself if you’re capturing your fair share of the value, and experiment, experiment, experiment.”

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Brad Keywell, co-founder and CEO of Uptake Technologies, reported, “IoT will generate 400 zettabytes of data per year by 2018. The question is how to pull data and outcomes to make opportunities and revenue. This is why we started Uptake, which is a predictive insight software provider that connects and analyzes massive amounts of untapped data. We’re sending software guys into the field and users to our offices to work with data scientists, and together they’re co-creating solutions on a single code base that can be applied to many industries.”

'Servitization' and security

[sidebar id =2]“We’re now seeing a third wave of cloud-enabled sensing that’s beginning to bypass traditional automation systems,” adds Harry Forbes, research director at ARC Advisory Group. “As a result, servitization of products will shift the way maintenance is performed, and industrial manufacturing will benefit from lower operating costs, while analytics and big data will enable manufacturing to run more predictive operations.”

To successfully convert products into IIoT-enabled services, however, requires thorough and carefully monitored cybersecurity, according to Sven Schrecker, chief cybersecurity architect in the IoT Solutions division at Intel, which is developing dedicated security microprocessors. “This fourth industrial revolution of IIoT or Industrie 4.0 has huge potential for optimization and productivity, but their many added connections mean many more possible attack vectors. As a result, many users need to understand that security isn’t just built on, and can’t exist in isolation. IIoT requires an overall, standardized, top-to-bottom, end-to-end trustworthiness that combines safety, operations technology (OT) and IT security, resilience, reliability and privacy that are designed and built in ahead of time.”

For more information about Smart Industry 2016, including an upcoming e-book covering presentations at the event, visit www.smartindustry.com