The IIoT Spotlight Podcast shines a light on Industrial IoT solutions that are impacting businesses today. Every episode we interview an expert about a specific IoT use case. Our goal is to provide insight into the planning and implementation of IIoT systems, from new business models to technology architecture selection to data ownership and security.

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EP001: Sensors are Transforming Construction — An Interview with Giatec’s Aali Alizadeh

Industrial IoT Spotlight: EP001: Sensors are Transforming Construction - An Interview with Giatec's Aali Alizadeh

Erik and Aali discuss the technology behind Giatec and the difficulty of entering traditional markets. Giatec offers IoT solutions to the construction industry.

Learn More: http://www.giatecscientific.com

EP002: Time Sensitive Networks — An Interview with Cisco’s Paul Didier and National Instruments’ Todd Walter

EP002: Time Sensitive Networks - An Interview with Cisco's Paul Didier and National Instruments' Todd Walter

Erik interviews Mr. Paul Didier from Cisco and Mr. Todd Walter from National Instruments about the Industrial Internet Consortium’s (IIC) Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) Testbed which uses real-time control and synchronization of high performance machines over a single, standard Ethernet network.

Learn more about the IIC: http://www.iiconsortium.org/index.htm

EP003: Crowdsourced Information Streams — An Interview with BlueCity’s Samrat Saha

EP003: Crowdsourced Information Streams - An Interview with BlueCity's Samrat Saha

Erik interviews Mr. Samrat Saha, the Principal of BlueCity LLC and together explore the benefits of data, security, and crowdsourced information. BlueCity has worked under the philosophy of “make an impact to the environment.” BlueCity was founded on the concepts of collaborative computing.

Learn more BlueCity LLC at http://www.bluecityllc.com

EP004: Deployment of IoT Applications — An Interview with XMPro’s Pieter van Schalkwyk

EP004: Deployment of IoT Applications - An Interview with XMPro's Pieter van Schalkwyk

In this episode, XMPro’s CEO Pieter van Schalkwyk discusses Industrial Internet implementation within Oil and Gas. Find out more about the challenges involved as well as the ideas in bridging the gap between IIoT concept and application in O&G.

Learn more about XMPro’s IoT solutions at http://xmpro.com

EP005: Operational Intelligence and Real-Time Performance Visibility — An Interview with PTC’s JP Provencher

EP005: Operational Intelligence and Real-Time Performance Visibility - An Interview with PTC's JP Provencher

In this episode, Mr. JP Provecher discusses how PTC’s ThingWorx platform enables the convergence through operational intelligence and real-time performance visibility.

Learn more about PTC’s ThingWorx platform at http://www.ptc.com.

EP006: Intelligent Manufacturing Solutions — An Interview with iCubed4’s Peter Rohde-Chen

EP006: Intelligent Manufacturing Solutions - An Interview with iCubed4's Peter Rohde-Chen

In this episode, Mr Peter Rohde-Chen explains how “iCubed4-MES” allows companies to start small when implementing a Smart Factory roadmap, and the benefits of MES-SaaS.

Learn more about iCubed4 at www.icubed4.com.

EP007: IoT Hardware Product Development and Acceleration — An Interview with Brinc’s Bay McLaughlin

EP007: IoT Hardware Product Development and Acceleration - An Interview with Brinc's Bay McLaughlin

In this episode, Mr Bay McLaughlin discusses how Brinc helps hardware founders establish early stage validation and traction with functional prototypes.

Learn more about Brinc at https://brinc.io/ or @betabay (Twitter).

EP008: Innovation in China — An Interview with Intel’s Kapil Kane

EP008: Innovation in China - An Interview with Intel's Kapil Kane

In this episode, Mr. Kapil Kane, the director of Intel’s innovation center joins us to discuss the challenges Intel faces when hiring and retaining talented engineers in China.

Learn more about Intel China on Wechat (intel-china) or http://www.intel.cn/content/www/cn/zh/homepage.htm.

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The IIoT Spotlight is produced by IoT ONE, an information platform that provides market insight, partner development, and go-to-market support for technology providers, end users, and investors.

Don’t forget to follow us on twitter @IotoneHQ or visit our website at www.iotone.com.

You can contact me directly at erik.walenza@iotone.com.

After an asset is sold it traditionally ‘goes dark’. Manufacturers lose access to the asset and the knowledge derived from its data. As Sir Francis Bacon declared, knowledge is power. And power can be monetized, as exemplified by Angolan President dos Santos’s $20 billion piggy bank. Digital twins are putting assets back on the map and power in the hands of the platform owner.

GE’s VP of software research Colin Parris defines a digital twin as a “living model of something that delivers a business outcome”. They take the guesswork out of data collection by maintaining an accurate digital representation of a physical asset that evolves as the asset ages.

GE is far from the only company in the game. CATIA Systems’ senior director of Sales, Eliane Fourgeau notes that “product complexity is driving a need to […] create convergence between the real and virtual worlds.” If go-to-market speed and service integration are priorities, you should be looking into digital twins.

CATIA Systems’ competitors in the CAD space — PTC, Siemens and Autodesk — are also bullish on the concept. Although companies disagree on implementation details, there is consensus that a digital twin can bring efficiencies to design, production and serviceability.

Who will win the IoT monopoly game?

The explosive growth of the IIoT is fueling the race to bring digital twin systems to market. Among the numerous hardware, software and service inputs into Industrial IoT solutions, analytics platforms are best positioned to monopolize markets.

GE Predix has taken the early lead by leveraging GE’s businesses to prove out the concept. Thus far, the technology only extends Predix’s reach into GE’s industrial assets and manufacturing processes. But you will soon be able to license digital-twin-as-a-service in a range of industries.

In contrast, Siemens chose to stick to its roots in factory automation. Their launch is lagging GE’s but their focus on industry verticals, rather than on a horizontal platform, may accelerate adoption.

It’s unlikely that a single platform will dominate the market. Horizontal platforms are an attractive monopoly play but vertically oriented solutions are more likely nail product-market fit.

Weaving the Digital Thread into Digital Twins

The digital thread is a communication framework for data flow throughout an asset’s lifecycle. The digital thread raises the bar for delivering “the right information to the right place at the right time”.

But the billion-dollar question is: how does the digital thread enable the digital twin? The digital thread provides a framework for accessing, integrating, transforming and analysing data from disparate systems throughout the asset lifecycle. In short, it links real world assets with their digital doppelgangers in near real time.

The current approach to handovers is “throw-over-the-wall”: after each team finishes their job, they “throw it over the wall” to next department. Using digital twin and digital thread solutions, departments can access accurate historical records of an asset, and can project its future development.

The Industrial Internet Consortium is implementing an Industrial Digital Thread (IDT) testbed to streamline design, manufacturing, service setup and root cause analysis for industrial manufacturing. Catch Dr. Richard Solely, Chairman of the IIC at the IoT Evolution Expo this Feb to learn about the IDT and other testbeds.

Where’s the money?

Before companies open their wallets they need more than promises of “reduced down-time” and “departmental synergies”. They need to see a bucket of ROI at the end of the rainbow.

So let’s take a look at the numbers: GE thought leader Dimitri Volkmann claims that anomaly detections from flights have been reduced by 15–30 days, lifecycle predictions for turbine blade models has contributed $44 million in savings, and optimisation of flight patterns and maintenance has resulted in $10 million in savings. Airplanes are at the apex of high-value assets and are a prime early adopter of digital twin and digital thread solutions.

Meanwhile, CSC is building a digital twin for a hybrid-car manufacturing process that predicts how a car will perform before committing to expensive changes in production. Digital twins of new models are analysed with different transmission, vehicle classes, engine displacements and fuel types to optimize the design. On average, the digital twin predicted city driving efficiency within 1.5 mpg.

Industrial IoT Thought Leadership

Artificial Intelligence, Automation and the Economy

The analysis and recommendations included herein draw on insights learned over the course of the Future of AI Initiative and Federal Government coordination efforts and public outreach on AI and related policies.

Avoiding the App Trap in Enterprise IoT

Focusing on an app distracts from or avoids entirely the much more critical system design work necessary for true enterprise IoT to succeed. A careful balance needs to be struck between system and project needs.

A Fresh Approach To Remote IoT Connectivity

Today’s networks are not designed to support the growth in traffic forecasted for the IoT. Future-proof connectivity requires additional design features and what are the connectivity partners that can provide the best options.

Originally published at www.iotone.com.

The Giants Vs. The Markets

Whether 2017 is a good year for wall builders remains to be seen. Just as President Trump reaffirms his plan to wall off the Mexican border, pressure in building to tear down the walls that silo IoT data. The details differ but the basic logic applies to both cases. Walls defend a market from competition but reduce overall efficiency.

Achieving interoperability between IoT devices is a technical challenge that many industrial giants have no interest in undertaking. Market leaders have invested millions in developing proprietary protocols which they use to lock customers into their ecosystem of solutions and partners. Connecting their walled gardens and interoperating with external solutions lessens their differentiation. Their short term interests lie in defending data fragmentation.

But every cloud has a silver lining. Standards groups are gaining momentum as more companies acknowledge that IoT markets simply will not mature while data is siloed. The Open Interconnect Consortium and the AllSeen Alliance recently merged to form the OCF in a bid to align standards.

Intel’s director for IoT communications frameworks, Gary Martz, told Fast Company, “Compatibility is not the space we need to differentiate our products on. This is the space where we all need to agree on interoperability, so we can all provide features above the standards.” We applaud.

DotDot, who’s there? Hello, it’s HaLow.

Our laptops and cellphones thrive on Wi-Fi but small IoT devices have typically lacked the energy to maintain Wi-Fi connectivity. To address the growing need, the Wifi-Alliance announced Wi-Fi HaLow in 2016. In addition to a lower energy demand, one major benefit is HaLow’s ability to penetrate walls.

WiFi’s biggest foothold is in media-rich devices: video cameras, streamed media and data-intensive apps. However, other protocols are not giving up the market without a fight. Z-Wave and Zigbee are both intensely competing for our homes.

Zigbee recently unveiled DotDot, “the universal language for the IoT”, which enables smart objects to work together on any network. Connecting 95 products across more than 30 manufacturers, DotDot shows early potential. But its competitor Z-Wave is a market veteran with more than a decade under its belt, and is supported by heavyweights GE, AT&T and Verizon. Z-Wave counts 325 companies in its alliance. However, unlike Zigbee, Sigma Designs own Z-Wave’s IP and this proprietary ownership could constrain adoption.

Some analysts predict true interoperability in 2017 but I expect the war of the standards to last well into the coming decade.

The eight layers of IoT Hell

Dante counted 9 circles of Hell. There are 8 standards layers in an IoT solution. So the journey to interoperability should be moderately easier than Dante’s journey through Hell.

Amazon Web Service (AWS) introduced its IoT solution as a “managed cloud platform that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices”. A nice sound bite. But as the figure below by OpenGeoSpatial shows, AWS with MQTT only addresses IoT network interoperability, it doesn’t address IoT data interoperability. In other words, networks can talk to each other but they speak different languages.

In their very thorough article on SociallyAware, Stephanie Sharron and Nikita Tuckett noted that “some question whether such consolidation is necessary or even feasible, because interoperability takes place at different layers within the communications protocol stack among IoT systems and devices.” Meanwhile, others, “emphasise that true interoperability requires any IoT device to be able to speak the same language, and connect and share information with other devices and systems, irrespective of platform or operating system, and that this requires one de facto protocol.”

In brief, we have yet to agree on whether we are in IoT Hell, let alone on the quickest path out.

Future Smart Metering & IoT

IoT is widely expected to get larger than the explosion of internet-related activities, with 3 key technologies to watch out: LoRaWAN, SigFox and NB-IoT. These technologies are changing the smart metering environment.

The Basics of MQTT

Focusing on an app distracts from or avoids entirely the much more critical system design work necessary for true enterprise IoT to succeed. A careful balance needs to be struck between system and project needs.

IoT Security As A Differentiator

IoT systems also depends on intrusion detection to be able to say that it has been attacked. One way to diagnose an intrusion is by means of redundancy in computations and processing, each isolated from one another.

Originally published at www.iotone.com.

Every quarter we assess more than 1,600 Industrial IoT companies and identify the 100 with the greatest impact in three areas: brand influence in markets, technology innovation, and ecosystem.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW FULL LIST

IoT ONE is an online platform devoted to accelerating adoption of Industrial Internet solutions. We map the global ecosystem of IoT vendors, use cases, case studies and technologies. The data is leveraged to help companies source technology, research competitors, and enter new markets.

We welcome you to advise future rankings. Share who you believe are the most influential IIoT companies here.

Sincerely,

Erik Walenza-Slabe
CEO, IoT ONE
Co-Chair of IIC SmartFactory Taskgroup
e: erik.walenza@iotone.com

TAGS: #IoT #IIoT #Industrial #Industry40 #InternetofThings #Smartfactory #ConnectedPlants #IoTPlatform #CyberSecurity #DigitalTwin #PredicitveMaintenance #Manufacturing