Momenta gets into the thick of IIoT at IoT World Congress
Last week, Momenta Partners attended IoT World Congress in Barcelona, an annual conference hosted by Barcelona Industry Week under the auspices of the Industrial Internet Consortium. With over 220 companies and 250 international experts and around 10,000 attendees, it was a great opportunity get a feel for the health of industrial IoT both conceptually and in practice. Here are some of our findings:
The Industrial IoT is an “evolutionary revolution”
The IoT market remains in its early stages, with many industrial firms, manufacturers and utilities in early stages of instrumenting assets for condition monitoring and analysis. There are more and more cases of hard ROI being realized. For example, Swedish company ABB highlighted how their Ability platform reduced capital expenses by 60%, commissioning costs by 50% and capital expense by 60% for a floating production, storage and offloading facility.
IoT brings secondary benefits to enterprises
The market is beginning to see distinct second order benefits from IoT. During a presentation by Schneider Electric, Deloitte highlighted its Amsterdam building, opened in 2015, outfitted with 26,000 sensors. The building has the lowest operating cost of any of its building in the world. Schneider’s strength is providing the backbone for energy and IT infrastructure. The building is a net zero energy building, doubling density prior to the setup. They wanted to reduce operating costs and provide a better workplace. Deloitte wanted to improve the brand to attract employees. Two years later the company has seen 4X the number of applicants that want to come to work at that building, with 98% acceptance of offers as a result of the building.
IoT is a path to digital transformation of the workplace
Microsoft highlighted how Steelcase is evolving beyond a provider of office furniture to workspace productivity. They are introducing IoT sensors and mobile apps to monitor the environment including the location of staff throughout the day and the usage patterns of the building, through the use of mechanisms such as heat mapping. Underpinning the collaboration is a belief that the workplace environment needs to be malleable to accommodate a range of different purposes and tasks, for example, the Workplace Advisor app can schedule meetings close to employees based on location, as well as accommodate remote workers.
The evolution of predictive maintenance
Predictive Maintenance continues to be a hot theme in Industrial IoT, with dozens of solutions focused on condition monitoring. Predictive Maintenance continues to evolve along vertically focused and equipment-specific lines, reinforcing findings from our Predictive Maintenance whitepaper and webinar.
Software solutions are lagging behind
Adoption of sensors and endpoint devices appears to be outpacing the adoption of IIoT software solutions, with the declining cost and increasing power accelerating the phases of initial instrumentation.
LPWAN remains a front runner
Growing interest in various Low Power WAN technologies with panels and vendors emphasizing the breadth of technologies, applying the best technology and solution for the best solution fit whether it be Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, NB-IoT, Sigfox, USSD or other.
Security is the responsibility of everyone
Security remains a key focus at the show to mitigate risks of hacking, and downsides of reliance on connectivity and cloud services. There’s a need to ensure product manufacturers think about security, with a recent Amazon Web Services outage, connected products went down including an oven. People don’t think about security and vendors don’t invest in security when price is the main buying criteria.
The 6 key observations are: