Applying New Technologies “Cloud/ Internet of Things” to Achieve addition “Jobs to be Done” vs Initially Applying to Existing Systems

Last week I was in Perth speaking with many people, and again it struck me that people were not looking a new opportunities for such technologies as the “cloud, or Internet of things” they were still in the traditional mindset.

As I have mentioned before I am a big believer in “The Outcome Driven Innovation” approach to looking at markets, opportunities. Providing a clear view into trends and focus on what is important.

So why are not people looking at the opportunities beyond the traditional industrial space of automation systems, to extend the scope and alignment of complete value chain. Example was with Invensys’s recent release of a “cloud based historian” the initial people you talk to are struggling on the benefit vs just a “tier 2 / Enterprise historian”. This is not surprising when “the conversation continued”, they were applying the technology to solve an existing “Job” problem which was well satisfied vs reviewing opportunities to add value that just are not served today.

But when I asked the question about their 1000’s of small auxiliary plants with low manning (if any),  for water, substations etc, and the opportunity to have 10 to 100 points coming up into a “managed  historian like service” so no need to: host, setup, manage a historian, and no need buy an over sized historian as now the small points from one plant can be included in a historian capability used by others (multi tenant). On the realization that we could actually extend the reach of the existing system, and therefore the opportunity optimize and tune these less visible plants, providing transparency and potentially interaction, people “sparked” up, and now the “Cloud” had some real additional value.

The same discussion happened over dinner with the “Internet of things” where again people were thinking of applying within the existing plants, vs extending the scope of control, visibility to a less well served segment of the value chain. Really the initial opportunity is to extend the unified system, and to remote devices and empower the roaming staff. Example is the “cold supply chain” in the distribution of food, where leaving the plant you have a series of refrigerated trucks and distribution centers. In order to achieve positive release of product and end to end full history the products. The “internet of things” provides the opportunity of each of the devices, plants (trucks) can be connected the temperatures of the products recorded as well as what products are in the truck. In a geographically distributed solutions, the concepts of isolated, remote assets, roaming value assets such as wells, trucks, and roaming people the logical is to have them all connected, the ability todo analysis and notification, react faster etc. Extending the traditional landscape/ scope of the automation system, with the technology step very minor if you have a 3G/ 4G approach and a tiered /Hybrid architecture. The hybrid architecture provides data integrity, with store forward etc,  addressing possible disconnects, but with the bandwidth management now available on data systems is key. This is only one example the if we look at other roaming equipment such as mine trucks and trains, wells and roaming drill rigs etc. Why now is because the technology, infrastructure and requirement exist, combining these provides a new level operational value. The move to supporting EDGE/ GPRS interfaces will become a natural part of industrial solutions, with self discovery capability.

Another discussion last week that stands out in my mind was around a customer who considered the cloud as unsafe from a security point of view. Then someone decided to really test this unsafe assumption and had an internal review of their security exposure vs the cloud solution, and it became very clear that their own “on premise” architecture was significantly more exposed than the cloud solution. This study was a good example of the ignorance of the new architectures; this customer is now shifting their architectural landscape to a hybrid architecture including “on and off” premise components.

It is clear that “Internet” will be part of the backbone of industrial automation and operations solutions. Especially as the market drives for more accountability End to End and decisions in the NOW, no matter where the key decision person is independent of device.