Top industrial Internet of Things vendors are Cisco, GE, IBM, Intel, RTI, Rockwell Automation
The Asian-Pacific region will lead market growth related to the industrial “Internet of Things,” which is expected to be worth $54 billion in that market by 2020, according to a new report from tech research firm Technavio.
The industrial “Internet of Things” – think smart utilities, light metering, manufacturing automation and the like – is currently worth around $38 billion in APAC.
Technavio machine-to-machine analyst Amrita Choudhury said, “Japan has introduced initiatives such as the Industrial Value Chain Initiative forum in 2015 to boost the country’s industrial Internet revolution, including the IIoT. Members of this forum include major Japanese companies in the electric, IT, machinery and automobile sectors such as Mitsubishi Electric, Fujitsu and Panasonic.”
The company gave a nod to organization and funding for industrial “Internet of Things” research and development initiatives being led by APAC governments. “Many countries in Asia are heavily investing in IIoT implementation, which will drive the demand for IIoT during the forecast period.”
Over in Europe, Technavio sees the market growing steadily through 2020, with the U.K. and Germany leading the way.
Following on Asian national initiatives, Germany launched its Industrie 4.0 project, which is a government-driven economic plan, supported by academia and industry designed to ensure German engineering prowess remains at the forefront of the IIoT.
From the report: “Factors such as security issues and resistance to shift from older technologies may restrain market growth” in Europe.
In North America, the IIoT push is being led by, among other groups, The Industrial Internet Consortium, which comprises Cisco, GE, IBM, AT&T and Intel, the report says. The consortium has 212 members organizing investment, consolidation and partnerships around IIoT.
“IIoT solutions are widely used by both small and large companies across Canada. Industries such as the pulp and paper and manufacturing are the major users of the IIoT. Subsidiaries of major multinational corporations work closely with major IIoT companies such as Cisco to adopt IIoT in various manufacturing processes,” Amrita said.
Let’s take a look at how some of these companies are impacting the IIoT space.
Cisco is a well-known software and hardware manufacture whose CEO Chuck Robbins has announced the company will begin to focus heavily on meeting the demands of the IoT economy.
Robbins told the press earlier this year “everything we build will be programmable.” Cisco is looking to secure a niche as an adaptive provider of IoT solutions for industrial systems, including a partnership with Fanuc America, which has 300,000 industrial robots in factories using Cisco products.
In November, Cisco and Ericsson announced a global partnership tying together their platforms to target telecom operators and reportedly produce at least $1 billion in incremental revenue opportunities for each company beginning in 2018. The partnership is said to offer a platform including routing, data center, networking, cloud, mobility, management and control, and tap their respective global footprints to “create the networks of the future.”
In its history, GE has done everything from manufacturing light bulbs to running a financial investment division. Currently, GE is one of the leading manufactures of heavy industrial machinery and, as such, an ideal company to look for ways to leverage the “Internet of Things.”
GE’s IoT software platform Predix is designed around integrating machine-generated data to cloud computing platforms, allowing GE clients to leverage big data for everything from hospital operations management, airline fuel optimization to electrical grid management. GE’s pre-existing relationship with many firms leveraging IoT positions it as a major player in the industrial IoT economy.
Real Time Innovation is a relative newcomer, having been founded in 1991, but is the only company whose entire business is built around industrial IoT. Despite only having 100 employees, the company says “our customers span the breadth of the industrial IoT, including medical, energy, mining, air traffic control, trading, automotive, unmanned systems, industrial SCADA, naval systems, air and missile defense, ground stations and science.”
RTI has been given top ratings by Forbes and CIO Review. The company’s IoT solutions and services run the entire gamut of the IoT needs from design to implementation.
IBM has sunk $3 billion into its IoT business and has partnered with AT&T to deliver industrial IoT solutions across a range of issues from energy efficiency to healthcare services. Bob Picciano, SVP for IBM Analytics, explained “our knowledge of the world grows with every connected sensor and device, but too often we are not acting on it, even when we know we can ensure a better result.”
IBM’s well-known machine learning platform Watson is a big part of IBM’s vision of the IoT world. The super computer is designed to render actionable insight from massive amounts of data produced by IBM IoT sensors at a pace no human could ever match.
In order to function, the “Internet of Things” relies on wireless broadband connections and AT&Tsees IoT applications in a number of verticals as the natural next step in the evolution of the company.
Unique among American carriers, AT&T has formed an IoT business unit and partnered with multiple companies to provide IoT network infrastructure and its own big data analytics. AT&T has also opened several IoT Foundries, focused on IoT research and development.
Glenn Lurie, CEO of AT&T Mobility, said at a recent event in Washington, D.C., “we only got into this space eight-plus years ago and we saw that everything in our lives was going to be connected.”
Some of AT&T’s IoT initiatives include smart city systems, cargo tracking and even outfitting every John Deere tractor manufactured with a cellular modem.
