IoT Forum Roundtable on Industrial IoT

Agenda, Attendee List and Presentations are available to members in the PRESENTATION LIBRARY 

Silicon Valley, California, Jan 2018/Meeting Recap/ Kicking off the year with a packed house at our host GE Ventures, the inaugural 2018 IoT Forum meeting on Industrial IoT Applications introduced eight companies all across the Industrial IoT Ecosystem. Agenda, attendee list, and photos now available in the online archive and presentations available to members in the online library.

The agenda included:

• A presentation from Falkonry, a firm focused on Time Series Analytics for Industrial Applications highlighted how their system leverages machine learning to make it easy for plant experts to build predictive models of potential production issues.
• io showed off how their delightful database mash-up of the best of SQL and NoSQL databases is accelerating the deployment of industrial IoT by letting heritage SQL professionals process structured and unstructured industrial data at blinding speeds.
• Xceler Systems shared their roadmap to connect cloud tested intelligence to edge devices using their neuromorphic architecture.  This allows firms to take the results of heavy iron analysis and apply it in real time at the end-point devices in Industrial IoT.
• Sierra Monitor, a provider of industrial IoT wireless connectivity solutions.  With a range of offerings from off the shelf gateways to radio modules that can be integrated at the end point, Sierra Monitor also provides methods to limit actions taken over their networks as part of their efforts to secure the Industrial Internet of Things.
• DataTorrent, the stream processing provide behind GE’s Predix, highlighted the importance of real time processing and insight gathering within Industrial IoT.  Their platform allows firms to processing streaming industrial data in real time, providing actionable insights immediately, rather than waiting for offline algorithms to highlight a problem.
• Embedded security firm Mocana shared how their Trust Chain solutions that compile directly on client hardware, ensure secure communications and operations along every link of the IoT value chain.
• Fog Computing firm Nebbiolo illustrated their complete platform from endpoints, device management, and analytics to push actionable intelligence to the edge.  Nebbiolo highlighted their early wins within industrial robotics, making it easier to bring aged assets into the 21st Century.

This month’s case study in Industrial IoT by Jim Rynne, GM of Vigilent, introduced their work with NTT in Japan.  Vigilent solves a critical issue for data centers by optimizing their climate control.  Leveraging proprietary influence mapping of how HVAC and equipment racks battle for temperature control in data centers, Vigilent was able save NTT over 30% in cooling cost in the first year of deployment and provide a complete ROI within two years of deployment.

Over lunch, IoT Forum members and guests participated in an unpanel discussion on Industrial IoT with Kevin Duffy, VP of Business Development at FogHorn and Rob Massoudi, Global Head of Digital Transformation at ABB, and moderated by Dr. John Feland of Argus Insights. The audience wanted data on use cases driving adoption of IIoT.  While both ABB and FogHorn have been successful in deploying solutions into clients, we learned that details of use cases tend to be trade secrets, with both clients and vendors alike a bit cagey as to how awesome these IIoT deployments have been.

For takeaways, the panel and the audience agreed that Industrial IoT should focus on bringing value to operations (OT) over IT, that the targets are more COOs than CIOs.  Rob described a vision where Industrial firms look forward to understanding and optimizing the systems within their plants, beyond the short term focus of controlling and understanding individual components.  Kevin articulated the need to consider both Cloud to Edge as well as Edge to Cloud deployments because of how much knowledge persists at the edge in these legacy systems and workflows, that not all the data needs to come back to the Cloud once the analytics models understand what at the Edge is critical to feeding the systems view.  Robotics potential to drive eventual autonomous operation of industrial facilities was echoed as the dream for both panelists but realizing that much work exists in both Security and Automation before that dream comes true.

Overall, it was a winning way to start 2018 and provided more hunger for the conversations at our next meeting on 15 February where the focus topic will be Robotics within the Internet of Things market.  We look forward to seeing you there!

Agenda, Attendee List and Presentations are available to members in the PRESENTATION LIBRARY