Operational Advantage will accelerate “Managed Services” Cloud adoption in the Industrial Sector!!!!

For the last couple of weeks, I seem to have ended up in a whirlpool of activity and interest around the cloud in the industrial landscape, not just from within Invensys, but also in the customer community. A world away from a year ago when it was hard to strike up a conversation of any reality around cloud in the industrial landscape. So I called a few people in the field and people who had approached us, or our partners and in a discovery mode as to what is driving them and why now?

There is a lot of speculation on why and who will adopt cloud technologies, this discussion will focus on historian/ process data in a managed service which is certainly one of the initial adoption areas in the industrial landscape, but certainly just one possibilities in the industrial landscape. Looking at the initial adopters of Cloud there will different reasons based upon the size of the organizations.

Early adoption of managed services will be the small business that do not have limited IT resources, who are also having to grapple with the changing consumer of the market, who need access to industrial information traditionally only for the control rooms.

Speaking with one company in the water industry, they have had SCADA systems years, with the data stored and available for analysis within a small community of people with access to this SCADA system. The changing market is requiring that this data be available for a larger community of people whom most are not situated at the plant, and in some cases are not even apart of the company. They also concerned that do not know how big this community will grow, and locations, and do not want dilute their core business focus of water management in building solutions. They not looking for a “cloud” solution they looking for a “Managed Solution” owned and executed by experts focused on these information systems. The interview drew for business jobs/ objectives they want and some clear associated desired outcomes.

Speed to value solution with minimal risk was high up on the list, they did not want wait around for solutions, they believe that the functionality must already exist and why re engineer  vs evolve from existing solutions. Key in this requirement was the need not drain vital internal resources in capital, or people.

Also, high on the list was increased availability, and removal of the “never ending circle of upgrades” this is for hardware and software, the resources needed, and most of all the loss in availability. By going external experts will manage this with the correct hardware and software capacity to maintain a higher availability.

Metering of costs became a topic it was not the reduction in cost, but the metering of cost that can increase as more value or capacity used, but also the ability to understand where the capacity is being used, by what departments or customers so the charges will be allocated to them directly. Instead of going through the endless Capex cycles for doing projects especially in the semi public sector.

Lastly it was scalability, the elasticity to change capacity not bigger but also smaller, to changed geographical consumption. They explained that new community is expending, the roles are changing, locations, but they have also seen contraction and then expansion again, this is hard to deal with in a internal project. Managed services will be able to deal with this change and cost will vary accordingly.

For large customers with IT departments many of challenges and drivers are the same but on a different scale, also the cloud also presents the opportunity commoditize the traditional data centers which are costly to maintain. The adoption in these bigger industries will less aggressive as they look at Private Cloud (not a long way from the old main frames), but even here there is a significant mind shift in the last 6 months.

Certainly on the small plants, sites there should be a significant debate as to why put “a server” on site for the company to maintain, when the common infrastructure is expanding so rapidly that off loading this unknown  to a “managed service” which can absorb the variability by spreading risk and capability over multiple customers. Especially when “managed services” will provide significant agility, operational flexibility and expandability at speed. As I stated a couple of weeks ago, "Managed Services" and "cloud computing" will enable a new dimension for the industrial architecture, the next significant leap through scalability, expertise capacity and cost, lifting it from the traditional architectures. The question is how far is the future again do not think it is years, think months. Especially as company leaders shift from thinking “managed services” as possible cost saving to delivering significant operational advantage.