News Feature | July 1, 2015

When Will Your IT Customers Use The IoT?

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

When Will Your IT Customers Use The IoT?

More and more, sensors, wearables, and “smart” devices are entering the consumer market — but when will your business IT clients incorporate these technologies?

An LNS blog post by Greg Goodwin defines the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) that is emerging as distinct from the Internet of Things in the consumer space. While the consumer-based IoT is developing smart home devices, wearables, and other gadgets to make life easier for the average person, the IIoT refers to “the concept of smart connected operations within a plant or production facility to create products and services.”

According to LNS Research, the IIoT should be seen as a subset of the broader IoT, where technologies are connected primarily to produce physical goods for the marketplace and to maintain the physical assets of production.

And the number and type of connected objects is projected to rapidly increase by 2020, when the network is expected to include devices, sensors, instrumentation, materials, mobile and fixed assets, and products. According to an Accenture study, the market for the industrial IoT by that time is expected to grow to $500 billion — from $20 billion in 2012.

A survey, conducted in October 2014 by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Zebra Technologies, revealed businesses are already using IoT technologies, including location tracking, Wi-Fi, GPS tracking, and bar codes for asset tracking. The report is a follow up to the 2012 Forrester outlook on the adoption of IoT in the enterprise. survey

The LNS blog points out a crucial barrier to the IIoT for manufacturing is the fact that most companies have legacy information and automation technology solutions that are not interoperable. This underscores the need for the creation of an IIoT platform capable of integrating information from these legacy systems. In the blog, Goodwin says a successful IIoT platform will meet four criteria:

  • Connectivity, to link hardware and software within the plant and enterprise.
  • Cloud, including all of the various enterprise-wide clouds to implement computing and storage capabilities where they are most in need.
  • Big Data analytics, including the use of a broad set of statistical and optimization tools to cleanse, monitor, and analyze structured and unstructured data.
  • Applications development, including necessary tools for facilitating mashup software applications that leverage all other areas of the IIoT platform and moving existing legacy applications on top of the platform.

Goodwin writes, “In these early stages, there is no single vendor that can yet provide capabilities in all four areas, and for now the creation of a viable IIoT platform will come through an ecosystem of vendors, most likely the large and established players in both the information and automation technology spaces.”