Piecing together the IIoT puzzle

After attending the IoT Summit and IMTS, it’s clear that the success of the Industrial Internet of Things relies as much upon technology and developers as it does on operators and, yes, system integrators.

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What would you do if someone handed you a very basic looking plug and said you could do anything with it? The answer is, you’d probably do nothing because you really don’t understand what it is or its potential. That was the experience of the developers at WeMo, a maker of “smart plugs” for the home that will control anything plugged into it, from lights to fans to washing machines to TVs, all of which are easy to access via a smartphone app.

The problem is, when WeMo began researching the Internet of Things (IoT) market and gave its smart plugs away as part of a promotional offer to fuel its market research, they stumped a lot of folks. Some individuals got very creative, like the guy who had an insect problem in his attic, and attached the smart plug to a vacuum cleaner, adding a motion sensor that would turn on the vacuum when the insects were present—thereby sucking up the little buggers. Another person programmed the plug to open and close the chicken coop door. But most folks just left it sitting on their desk, or, more likely, in the garbage pail.

This story from Peter Taylor, vice president of products at Belkin, WeMo’s parent company, has little to do with the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), but everything to do with the overarching attitude about all this smart stuff infiltrating our homes, offices and plant environments.

Taylor spoke at the IoT Summit in Boston last week, along with other suppliers from the networking, cloud and wearable markets. And, while the focus was slanted toward commercial applications for consumers, there were some coinciding themes with the industrial industries specifically around the interoperability of “things” and the culture shift that needs to happen.

Taylor noted that there is a huge learning curve associated with the variety of use cases, and, more importantly, what to do with the millions of data points that will be generated from smart home inhabitants.

That’s kind of what we’re grappling with in the industrial space, too. As I walked the floor at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) this week, it was hard to walk past a booth that didn’t have some kind of IIoT reference attached to it. But whether it was a connected controller, a network gateway, or a predictive maintenance application, each product is just one part of what IIoT is—which is a network of intelligent systems, devices, and objects that collect and share massive amounts of data.

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