The Pragmatic requirements for the Industrial IoT

Most of us agree that the Industrial IoT (IIoT) is poised to make an immense positive difference to the everyday lives of people. Yet, with this positive affirmation of value, the very rapid adoption of Industrial IoT into businesses has been less than stellar. While there are many obstacles to overcome involving people, products and processes, there are real-world challenges in the “Industrial” IoT that require pragmatic solutions. For example, how are devices expected to collaborate with each other (a fundamental tenant of the IoT), if they cannot even speak the same language of data? This is particularly true with the heterogeneous nature of modern industrial deployments that have a never-ending collection of legacy and emerging devices, sensors, and protocols.

I wrote the article, "Industrial IoT: A recipe for success" , really driven out of a sense of unease that vendors will simply keep parachuting into industrial deployments with “newer and smarter” capability, under the expectation that everything will magically work together.  It does not do so easily; and mainly, because many traditional (legacy) industrial systems were never designed to easily interoperate in this heterogeneous internet world. 

Since rip and replace is not an option for most customers, the baffling question still remains: How does an IoT platform “optimally” embrace such legacy systems; extend them to cooperate with emerging devices/protocols; and then enhance the overall solution to create better business outcomes? This article touches on some of the real challenges that industrial companies face in rapidly adopting the Industrial IoT at scale.

As an industry, we can create the “pragmatic” interoperable solutions needed to reduce the total cost of ownership and help accelerate the adoption of the Industrial IoT.