Many Challenges Remain to Roll Out Industrial IoT

Data that will be collected through the emerging IoT will be transformative for many businesses, Bryan Tantzen, senior director in Cisco’s IoT Business Unit, said Monday at Fierce’s virtual Industrial IoT Summit. The transformation is just getting started and many companies are still using clipboards to record numbers rather than putting in sensors and doing automatic data collection, Tantzen said. “The promise of this new data is vast,” he said: “We think we can eliminate 80% of unplanned downtime. We can dramatically improve overall equipment effectiveness. We can even speed new product introduction.” In the post-COVID-19 era, businesses will focus on sustainability “so you can keep the lights on as a utility and make the grid more resilient,” Tantzen said. In factories, “when a robot goes down you no longer have to wait and fly in an expert,” he said. “You can virtualize that expertise and get remote … maintenance that can reduce downtime,” he said. The time is now to address security risks from the IoT and the automation, he said. “We’re seeing threats everywhere, not only malware,” he said. Most of the IoT is “a hard shell with a soft middle” and doesn’t have adequate security, he said: “That will not work going forward.” Looking at what the industrial IoT can do for a business shouldn’t start with use cases, said Saip Yilmaz, Black & Decker director-industry innovation. “Focus on your strategy, how you will compete in the market,” he said. “Thinking about the future state of your strategy really helps to set your goals,” he said. “Don’t become another data rich, information poor company,” he said. Understand the use case and then decide what technology would work best, advised Kervin Blanke, head of U.S. operations for Kinexon, an IoT company. There’s not “one sensor that’s going to do it all; it’s more complex than that,” Blanke said. Companies need a single platform that can tie all of their sensors together, he said. Lots of companies are investing in use of the IoT for predictive maintenance, said Markus Larsson, member of the senior leadership team at California’s Palo Alto Research Center. “The performance of what has been rolled out, broadly speaking, just hasn’t been good enough,” he said.