Impressions From The IoT Solutions World Congress 2017

I recently returned from the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona. I love this city. Despite the political turmoil, the beauty of Catalonia and its people was once again the perfect milieu for this largest Industrial Internet gathering. For a third year in a row, IoT Solutions World Congress did a tremendous job focusing this year especially on the business value of IoT/IIoT. Compelling keynotes, presentations filled with real-world deployment of IoT/IIoT solutions, and a vibrant exhibit hall with inspiring demos and Testbeds. Another exciting addition was the Blockchain track. Impressive! The congress was organized by Fira Barcelona and the Industrial Internet Consortium.

Here are some of my impressions:

• Emphasis on Business Value from IIoT: I had indicated this in the video I had prepared for the event and overall I was not disappointed. Business value, pragmatic implementations, and business returns were recurring themes.There were plenty of examples showing specific ROI benefits and gains. One of the more interesting examples that was presented during a keynote was Deloitte’s Smart Building (the Edge) in Amsterdam. This building is claimed to be the smartest and greenest most efficient — building in the world. The ROI of such an IoT/IIoT are impressive. One of them was the ability to produce 102% of its own energy. There were other examples of energy savings through IoT/IIoT for buildings and industry sites for Manufacturing or Oil & Gas. The presentations and demos illustrated many similar ROIs through IoT/IIoT solutions in various industries.

• Closing the loop — from sensing to value: Several of the keynotes and presentations emphasized the sensing to business value stream. Not surprisingly IoT/IIoT is generating and will continue to generate enormous amounts of data. Intel’s keynote brought this point home through illustrating the exponential explosion of IoT/IIoT data as well as the value stream from sensing to business ROI. AI for analysis as well as intelligent processing of the IoT data at the edges is essential. The value though is achieved in the context of end-to-end automated processes. More on this below.

• Predictive Maintenance: A number of Exhibitors as well as Sessions emphasized perhaps the robust use case of IoT/IIoT business value: Predictive Maintenance. I had covered this in an earlier article on Digital Prescriptive Maintenance as the killer application for IoT/IIoT. Adding connectors to devices or assets that are not connected can greatly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness in maintaining the asset. IoT/IIoT connectivity allows streams of asset event data be analyzed either at the edges or within the cloud or data centers to predict and prescribe maintenance. The cost savings could be substantial — especially when compared to re-active after the fact maintenance activities.

• Agile Manufacturing:Some Presentations and Exhibits touched upon the increased potential of agility and adaptability in different phases of end-to-end digitized Manufacturing, leveraging connectivity and AI analytics — the essence of Industrie 4.0. A core premise and capability here is leveraging aggregated sensor data from various manufacturing assets, gaining insight and operationalizing efficiencies. Accenture had a compelling demo on Agile Manufacturing with continuous monitoring of the assets, gaining business insights and following up with diagnostics and actions. The Adaptive Digital Factory is becoming a reality!

• Testbeds: This year also there were a number of interesting Testbeds such as Time Sensitive Networks for Industry 4.0 Manufacturing applications, with Cisco and other testbed participants. It demonstrated many features of smart networks that are essential for next generation standards-based secure interoperability of high performance industrial internet applications.

• Blockchain: The Blockchain Solution Forum was an interesting and impactful addition to this year’s IOTSWC. There were Showcases and several Sessions on Blockchain and IoT. As industries cooperate and collaborate for end-to-end innovative applications across boundaries, Blockchain can be a promising backbone for security and connectivity. One of the more interesting and promising applications areas for Blockchain, especially with IoT, is Logistics and Supply Chain. Blockchain can be leveraged for asset tracking, contracting, and financial transactions — all necessary when multiple organizations are involved often across geographical boundaries.

Overall a well-organized and great event for the Industrial Internet. However, I would be amiss without emphasizing a most critical digital transformation perspective that need to be elevated and prioritized at IOTSWC as well as other IoT/IIoT initiatives. In various IIoT collaboration initiatives, such as Testbeds, the focus is typically on technology reference architecture coordination in the context of vertical layers or levels. That is good and important. However, business value measures (KPIs, NPSs, CTXs) are invariably associated with value streams (aka value chains) that span business units or organizational boundaries. In pragmatic digital transformation business value is achieved through the automation and digitization of value streams: particularly through process automation and dynamic cases. Interestingly emerging technologies such as Blockchain, real-time analytics, AI or other “platform” solutions can potentially provide the lower and mid-level infrastructure foundation for end-to-end digitization. However, the direct and robust alignment of business performance to execution though is achieved through digital process automation and dynamic cases supporting the orchestration of organizations, people, connected Things, and enterprise applications.

Looking forward to IOTSWC 2018 …

This article was originally published on LinkedIn