Many of our readers know my references to the Internet of Things (IoT) using the old parable of the “Blind men and an elephant” from the Indian Subcontinent. The parable talks about a group of blind men who have encountered an elephant and are trying to determine what it is by grabbing the closest body part to them. This approach results in one describing the animal as something like a spear, and others saying the elephant resembles things like a tree trunk or a fan, depending on where they grabbed the poor creature.
The parallel to the IoT of course is that everyone perceives it from their perspective; a software engineer has a different parallax on a problem than an electronic engineer, for example, even though they are working with similar end systems and functionalities. Einstein’s statement about reality being based on the point of view of the observer applies to a lot more things than special relativity.
We have long predicted that the IoT will eventually break up into various application spaces, bins, if you like, where financial models favor aggregation of IP and standards. One can argue that the automotive IoT space will be the first to completely wall itself off as a fiefdom due to its special environmental needs and regulatory reguirements. The industrial space is rapidly developing into one of these as well for the same reasons. Industrial IoT, or IIoT, is already fast becoming a subset of the IoT with its own (related) protocols, standards, and procedures.
Industrial systems have a great many special needs (one of which is a truly robust, elegant, and universal modern power/signal cable and connector interface), and every single one of them is based on hard cold realities. This differs from the consumer space where frivolities can capture market share just because they stimulate the customer’s imagination. Nobody (please, please email me if you hear otherwise) ever bought an industrial system just because it was painted a cool color.
This means that the developing IIoT infrastructure will eventually migrate into something real and dependable. It will have to be, because in a competitive marketplace business will tolerate nothing less. Solutions will have to be compact, robust, compliant, and dependable in order to become part of the system architecture of the IIoT.
This reliability extends from the hardware systems through the software interface, as dependable today also means resistant to the kinds of risks that originate from hackers and other external software agents. That sensor must not only resist heat, cold, impact, vibration, minor misalignment, and ambient atmosphere, it must also shrug off web-based disruptions as well. For all the bells and whistles of functionality that we wish to build into the IIoT, we can never lose sight of the fact that it is all a chain from the hardware to the software through to the user themselves.
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