

Consumers are increasingly interacting with more devices in our daily lives that are “smart”: smart phones, smart appliances and even smart cars. And as consumers drive their smart cars, they’re using apps to listen to music, get driving directions or locate the nearest coffee shop, and that connected data goes into a cloud repository that can be collected and analyzed. All of those devices and information processing makes up the “internet of things.”
In a similar manner, within factories, the industrial internet of things is where connected devices, sensors and computers collect and analyze data from a factory floor. The application of the IoT in industrial environments will allow organizations to process much larger data sets much faster, leading to changes in understanding how factories operate, as well as how users behave and make their decisions based on that data.
For consulting companies, such as Deloitte, the information collected from consumers and industry is in itself not that interesting; rather, the allure is how the data enables companies to improve their day-to-day business and how it can provide specific, measurable results.
“We really wanted to bring it to ‘What’s the value behind IoT?’” said Robert Schmid (pictured), chief IoT technologist and managing director at Deloitte Digital. Schmid recently spoke with Peter Burris, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss how IoT influences behaviors and the need for industry-focused IoT solutions.
Within a factory, it’s now possible to connect data from the beginning to the end of the factory line using IoT and then combine that information with contextual data. For example, it’s now possible to track the precise temperature of a machine and the vibration of its current to an extent that was not possible to do before. This whole time series of data points can now be correlated in new ways.
“I always think of IoT as taking sensor data and making decisions based on [that data],” Schmid said. Although the information is useful, it’s humans who make the final decisions, based on the data.
Schmid’s team found an interesting dilemma, where they thought they had a good sense of what goes on within a factory, based on self-reporting tools from users. Now, with sensors, it’s possible to measure what’s actually going on in any given area, getting a much clearer and more accurate picture of operations.
There are many IoT vertical use cases in the field, but they’re onetime applications that aren’t useful to scale up for use in other areas, according to Schmid. There are vertical, narrow pillars versus the horizontal platforms that the big providers are selling, he added. He’s looking forward to seeing more consolidation in the market in which some of the vertical solutions are bought out by the platform companies to provide better use cases. “We need industry-focused solutions,” he said.
Here’s the entire video interview with Schmid, part of many ongoing CUBE Conversations:
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