UPDATED 13:30 EDT / AUGUST 06 2018

INFRA

Coffee and rubber ducks help Deloitte’s ‘Mr. IoT’ explain the industrial future

It might be hard to imagine, but the future of the industrial internet of things could well be symbolized by the much-beloved rubber duck.

Ever since a sculptor patented a now-familiar rubber duck design in 1949, the iconic bath toy has steadily worked its way into global culture. It’s the name of a minor league baseball team (Akron Rubber Ducks), the focus of a race on the Thames River in Great Britain where 205,000 rubber ducks filled the waterway, and the subject of a world record 61-foot tall, 15-ton replica.

Now, the rubber duck is also the focus of an immersive augmented reality experience created by Deloitte Digital. The Virtual Factory app shows how a combination of industrial systems and preconfigured IoT accelerators can drive a supply network and create value across an entire factory production line in weeks.

“I call it the Internet of Rubber Ducks,” said Robert Schmid (pictured), chief IoT technologist and managing director at Deloitte Digital. “It really shows how when you change the [technology] blend at the beginning of the production line, how it affects the end of the production line.”

Schmid spoke with Peter Burris, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss reasons for Deloitte’s involvement in IIoT, the dilemma faced by companies seeking solutions from use cases in vertical markets, the importance of real-time accurate information for manufacturing companies, and the role of data analytics at the edge in driving IoT technology adoption.

This week theCUBE features Robert Schmid as its Guest of the Week.

Weekly TV show on IoT

The use of rubber ducks is just part of Deloitte’s strategy to find visual ways the firm can use to illustrate the impact of IoT technology on industrial production. Schmid has been a leader in the firm’s industrial focus, earning the title “Mr. IoT,” from his hosting a weekly live show on YouTube, called “Coffee With Mr. IoT.”

Deloitte recently issued a report showing that industrial IoT will surpass consumer usage in India by 2020, with energy and utilities sectors contributing nearly 25 percent of the market share. “Today, we see that the most focus is around industrial IoT,” Schmid said. “There were a lot of science experiments going on around IoT, which were technology based, but we really wanted to focus on the value behind IoT.”

That value proposition has become something of a moving target. In contrast to the hype that IoT is receiving around the world, Deloitte recently published a blog post describing the results of a Cisco Systems Inc. study that showed nearly three-fourths of IoT projects among the industrialized nations of the United States, Great Britain and India were failing.

Challenge of moving beyond verticals

Among the challenges facing IoT implementation are security, complexity, difficulty finding qualified talent, and gaining actionable insights from IoT-powered data. There’s also a question of how IoT technology can successfully move beyond the vertical solutions where it has been deployed.

A sensor-driven solution for temperature control in a truck, for example, may not work as effectively in a warehouse environment. This is part of the problem that the IoT ecosystem will need to solve.

“I see a lot of very vertical, very single use case-oriented solutions that go all the way from sensor to edge to cloud to hopefully integration with the back-office systems,” Schmid explained. “That’s the interesting dilemma right now. The moment you want to start doing something with your warehouse where you have other sensors and you need a horizontal platform, those vertical solutions fall short.”

Do plant managers truly understand what’s happening in their industrial production line environments? Sensor technology has rapidly found a home in industrial IoT applications because it can provide a wealth of data that paints an infinitely more complete picture of the operations.

This is where industrial IoT may currently be having its biggest impact, as sensors help with critical functions like predictive maintenance and manufacturing logistics. “We take what we think we know to what we actually know, because we can measure with sensors what goes on in an area,” Schmid said. “Now you can actually see what happens in the factory when I tune the mix or the blend of my raw materials, what happens to the product that gets made at the end of that.”

Analysis moves from cloud to edge

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are also poised to play a significant role as the IoT story plays out. Deloitte noted in its recent report that data analysis generated from IoT devices is moving rapidly from cloud to edge. Gartner has even predicted that the majority of industrial IoT data analytics will be edge-driven by 2020, a sharp increase from the 10 percent reported last year.

The trend toward data science work has also brought Schmid full circle. The Deloitte executive, who holds a master’s degree in petroleum engineering, has seen the melding of operations technology with information applications in the cloud or at the edge.

“When I studied, I’d build really fancy models, and I always thought that the most fancy math we’d ever do was percentage calculations,” Schmid recalled. “Now, I find myself in this awesome place where I can bring together some of that [operational technology], some of that deep data science work that I did early on in my life, with some of the process and system implementation expertise and practices that have come out of information technology.”

In a recent press interview, Schmid spoke about the excitement he feels over the rise of IoT technology in the industrial environment. In a situation where knowledge is critical, yet precise information has historically been hard to obtain, sensor-driven data can finally provide the real story.

“Where we used to guess, estimate, extrapolate, now we know,” Schmid said. For the man who speaks around the globe about the Internet of Rubber Ducks, that’s something to quack about.

Here’s the entire video interview with Schmid, part of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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