The challenges for software developers

Connectivity and big data are remaking the industrial world. Who knew that an aircraft engine could detect issues before it causes downtime; or that a wind turbine could alert the on-ground field technician what needs to be fixed or looked at without having to climb up to perform a diagnostic inspection; or that a busy hospital could predict capacity bottlenecks and improve patient flow. Advances in both technology and business models continue to drive the next wave of productivity and efficiency gains across the industrial sector.

Software developers building these next-generation machine-centric Industrial Internet solutions face a couple of recurring challenges in making machines more intelligent and the operations around them more automated:

• Complexity and hard-wiring – Machine-resident software is traditionally machine-specific and tied closely to the underlying hardware. One cannot typically swap out the underlying hardware or easily load a new version of the software or partition aspects of the software. This lack of a common machine software architecture prevents developers from meeting requirements for application agility, interoperability, portability and scalability. Hence, any changes to machine software are difficult, costly and risky, especially in an “always-on” industrial environment.

• Fragmentation – There’s a dearth of standard approaches to building reusable and secure machine applications that can make machines intelligent, be built at scale, have low lifecycle costs, reduce development risks, and be interoperable.

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Why these challenges must be addressed

The consumer electronics industry has shown a number of ways interoperability can foster innovation. Consider an example of Internet-connected TVs. Consumers can easily download a variety of authorized apps at the click of a button or update games and other apps automatically. Even a non-connected TV hooks up easily to a $49 streaming player to consume the latest digital content through software apps without being constrained by its underlying TV hardware.

In both of these scenarios, consumers are able to watch the latest digital content without worrying about the location and logistics of where the digital content is coming from. Consumers do not need to upgrade their TVs to a new shiny model. App developers, on the other hand, benefit from the software architecture by being able to easily and quickly create portable applications for the standardized connected TV platforms.

The industrial sector is increasingly leveraging the same approach to meet its unique requirements. It’s now possible for a hospital MRI machine to get a secure virtual upgrade every time a connected backend server gets richer in computing power. In other use cases, software developers are now able to reuse software apps, such as a location-aware module, on multiple types of machines.

This flexibility is made possible through an emerging secure and standardized software infrastructure that is portable and reusable across machines and sectors. It allows shorter development timeframes, lowers the cost of goods, and decreases business and technical risks—all powerful benefits in today’s connected world.

Stay tuned for my next blog as I share how architectural innovations are driving new possibilities for developers to build a new generation of Industrial Internet solutions.