Getting your business model ducks in a row for IIoT

Far away from the world of consumer gadgets, the proper implementation of Industrial IoT is increasingly preoccupying the minds of company executives who want to digitise and automate their processes and facilities. Switching a factory’s shop floor over to IIoT can be a daunting task, with serious risks but potentially massive benefits.

Speakers at CW’s inaugural Industrial IoT event, held at Fujitsu’s London headquarters, were acutely aware of the need for sound business models and decent infrastructure.

GSMA’s Peter Montgomery, Mobile Broadband SIG champion, told the assembled delegates:

“If you read the popular press you’d think IoT is limited to connected cars and checking to see if your kids have turned the heating’s thermostat up too many times. But actually it’s what happens underneath. From an industry perspective, how can you bring in cost efficiencies, savings and time to market?”

Business plans were key to helping companies gain new insight into their processes, agreed 42 Technology’s David Griffin. “It’s important to be realistic about the whole lifecycle of a product. This goes well beyond battery life”, he added: “it’s also important to consider whether the network the product is connected to will still be around 10 years from now”. Beckhoff Automation MD Stephen Hayes explained how businesses can scale up beyond pilots and niche markets by introducing MobiusFlow – a piece of kit that allows interoperability between all devices.

After a hardware-heavy morning, Ansys’ Industry Director Robert Harwood shifted gears with a lively discussion on the “electric revolution” and the “transition from dumb to smart” as industries blur under “digitalisation”. He said a platform is needed to take data and sensors, communicate with them, and connect the producer of that data with the consumer. A physics-based simulation environment has a fundamental role to play in the development of autonomous cars and other IoT devices, Harwood added.

Before lunch, Bill Clee from Asset Mapping discussed the three timezones of IoT. And he dryly noted that, at the moment, there are more platforms in the world than there are operational sensors.

After lunch, Dave Watson from Trendalyze Decisions talked about his firm’s highly scalable platform for industrial IoT sensor data. Watson’s talk was followed by Arqiva’s business development director, Ian Stewart, who said that IoT “is the most misrepresented, overhyped technology phenomena of our time, to be blunt.” It’s up to the industry to “take a step back and just think logically” about the statistics being claimed for IoT.

He added: “If the business case is so compelling, why haven’t we seen any of these numbers to date?” Stewart believes, however, that low-power wide area networks can play a role in seizing on the promise of Industrial IoT.

Last of the day was ContinuumBridge’s Peter Claydon, who introduced the audience to his internet-connected button, Spur.

“How do you stick it to the wall?”, asked Industrial IoT SIG champion Iain Davidson from Arkessa.

The answer: double-sided sticky pads.

“The lesson was four aren’t enough; we need six to hold it on.”

The day wrapped up as usual with panel debate, during which the speakers and audience expressed some concern about the inherent weakness of cloud providers, and collectively agreed not to get bogged down on this occasion in the Voldemort issue of IoT: security.

Kelly Fiveash

Reporting for CWJ

Kelly Fiveash has been a technology journalist for over a decade. Most recently, she was news editor at Ars Technica. Before that, Kelly worked her way up from reporter to networks correspondent to weekend editor at The Register. She is now a freelance writer and editor specialising in tech policy, information security and telecoms.

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This article was originally published in the CW Journal: Volume One, Issue Two.

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