In part 2 of our talk with Bill Morelli, IHS Technology’s associate director of M2M and IoT, Bill discusses the trends from his 2014 report on the “Industrial Internet of Things - 2014” report and the promise of the Industrial IoT.
ECHELON: What is different about the 2014 report from your previous IoT paper?
BILL MORELLI: One big difference is that we have a lot more granularity. In the first report we had lighting as one massive category. On this go-round, we moved residential lighting to the home automation category, and kept the lighting that was being used in commercial buildings in the building automation data. So the lighting number in the current industrial Internet of Things report represents municipal lighting and industrial lighting only. The aggregated data for building automation includes building automation equipment, and building lighting, and commercial building metering.
ECHELON: How did that regrouping change the stats?
MORELLI: Moving residential lighting to our smart home report gave us more sanity around the industrial numbers. Because obviously, when you start counting light fixtures, the numbers can ramp up pretty quickly.
ECHELON: Have your lighting forecasts changed then?
MORELLI: Yes, when you back out the residential lighting and commercial building lighting, then lighting’s grown a little bit slower. It’s about 10.2 percent -- so still significant over the five-year forecast period. But a lot of the growth for lighting is in commercial building automation, and that’s what’s helping to push the (building automation) number up a little bit higher at 23 percent.
ECHELON: What role do big data and analytics play into the growth of the industrial IoT?
MORELLI: The IoT provides a situation where you’re generating an awful lot of data. And in the case of some industrial equipment – especially safety related equipment -- you need to be able to analyze that in real time. And so that’s where cloud potentially comes into play. You may not even need to store the data; it may just be a question of needing to have it available long enough to do the analytics to come to a determination, and then you’re bringing in a fresh data set.
ECHELON: So what’s the big ‘ah-ha’ from the report?
MORELLI: In the stage we’re at now, a lot of it’s about having the connectivity, having the intelligence, figuring out how to collect the data and what sensors you might need. We’re just starting to move to the point in which we’re figuring out how we do the complex analytics to drive the business decisions that we need.
ECHELON: And further down the road, what do you see?
MORELLI: In the longer-term vision -- your eight, ten-year long range vision—we’ll get to a point where, utilizing the cloud and utilizing some of the standards that are starting to emerge here, disparate systems will be able to start sharing information to create a greater benefit.
ECHELON: Can you give us an example?
MORELLI: I like SmartCities as an example. Today in a city you may have a first-responder network, a traffic control system, and a transport and polling system. You may have individual vehicles able to tap into traffic apps to help map traffic. But none of those systems are connected. In fact, they’re not integrated at all.
In a true IoT SmartCities environment, you could have some level of information sharing, and some intelligence behind that. Then if there were an accident, you could respond in real time to move people away from the accident and route first responders there more quickly, and then transport victims to the nearest emergency facility in the quickest way possible.
So we’re kind of moving toward that type of vision. We’re not quite there yet. But to me, that’s the real, the promise of the industrial Internet of Things.
IIoT Talks is a conversation between industry luminaries and Echelon Corporation about the opportunities of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Echelon's Chief Marketing Officer, Wendy Toth, will share highlights of these conversations via the company blog. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to [email protected].
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