Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: industrial internet

GE’s Predix predicament – an industrial giant finds software is hard
Industrial giant General Electric is finding software is hard, reports Business Insider.

The company, which former CEO Jeff Immelt declared was a ‘digital industrial company’ is finding its Predix software system and associated cloud services are far more complex and difficult to manage than expected.

Back in 2015, I toured the head office of GE Software outside of Silicon Valley and interviewed the division’s boss, Bill Ruh.

Ruh was upbeat about the internet of things – or Industrial Internet in GE’s terminology – with an estimate the IoT was worth $14 billion to the company as it found new efficiencies and markets.

Today that vision’s looking a little tarnished as the company struggles with a 25% share price drop and a self imposed ‘time out’ on Predix’s development.

GE’s IoT predicament illustrates just how complex the engineering and management challenges of the Internet of Things really are.

The software needs of a sensor in a train brake pad are very different to that of fuel pump in a jet engine or the blade controllers of wind turbine.

Added to that is the challenge of organising, storing and securing the information these devices collect. This is the main reason why GE is moving its data management services to AWS and Microsoft Azure.

That a company with the resources and top level commitment of GE is struggling with this underscores the complexity of the internet of things. That complexity is something every IoT advocate and connected device vendor fails to consider at their, and their customer’s, peril.

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August 30, 2017
Towards the zero defect economy
At 2.03 in the morning of July 11, 2012, a Norfolk Southern Railway Company freight train derailed just inside the city limits of Columbus, Ohio.

The resulting crash and fire caused over a hundred people to be evacuated, resulted in over a million dollars in damages and created massive disruption throughout the US rail network.

Could accidents like this be avoided by the Internet of Things? Sham Chotai, the Chief Technical Officer of GE Software, believes applying sensor technology to locomotives can detect conditions like defective rails and save US railway operators around a billion dollars a year in costs.

“We decided to put the technology directly on the locomotive,” says Chotai in describing the problem facing railroad operators in scheduling track inspections. “We found we were mapping the entire railway network, and we were mapping anything that touched the track such as insulated joins and wayside equipment.”

This improvement in reliability and its benefits to business is something flagged by then Salesforce Vice President Peter Coffee in an interview with Decoding the New Economy in 2013.

“You can proactively reach out to a customer and say ‘you probably haven’t noticed anything but we’d like to come around and do a little calibration on your device any time in the next three days at your convenience.’”

“That’s not service, that’s customer care. That’s positive brand equity creation,” Coffee says.

Reducing defects isn’t just good for brands, it also promises to save lives as Cisco illustrated at an Australian event focused on road safety.

Transport for New South Wales engineer John Wall explained how smarter car technologies, intelligent user interfaces and roadside communications all bring the potential of dramatically reducing, if not eliminating, the road toll.

Should it turn out the IoT can radically reduce defects and accidents it won’t be good news for all industries as John Rice, GE’s Global Head of Operations, pointed out last year in observing how intelligent machines will eliminate the break-fix model of business.

“We grew up in companies with a break fix mentality,” Rice says. “We sold you equipment and if it broke, you paid us more money to come and fix it.”

“Your dilemma was our profit opportunity,” Rice pointed out. Now, he says engineering industry shares risks with their customers and the break-fix business is no longer the profit centre it was.

A zero defect economy is good news for customers and people, but for suppliers and service industries based upon fixing problems it means a massive change to business.

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July 3, 2015
How software defines the Industrial Internet
The Internet of Things is a three legged stool of the consumer, enterprise and industrial applications says Vice President of GE’s software division, Bill Ruh.

“It’s about connecting machines, connecting people and driving a new kind of experience. For the consumer it’s a social experience, for the enterprise it’s a whole new way of how their IT departments running, in the industrial space it’s a revolution where we get to rethink how we operate.”

Ruh sees the IoT as being worth over 14 trillion dollars to GE over the next two decades, making it bigger than the other two legs combined.

Eliminating downtime

Most of that value comes from three areas; improved resource utilisation, operational optimisation and eliminating unscheduled downtime.

“The fact is downtime is expensive, for airline 41% of all delays and cancellations are due to mechanical errors. If we get rid of those your life gets better, my life gets better and the airline’s lives get better.”

“Zero unscheduled downtime doesn’t sound sexy but it’s one of the most profitable and sexiest topics ever.” In this Ruh agrees with Salesforce’s Peter Coffee that eliminating outages is a key part of delighting the modern customer.

Ruhe sees that the industrial sector hasn’t used IT and the internet well in the past, “RFID was going to change the world and it didn’t, we saw smartgrids were going to be the biggest thing and it didn’t achieve a lot of the hype that people saw.”

“Now the technology is aligned not just with technology for technology’s sake but to an outcome that leads to growth for an industrial sake.”

An example of the operational efficiencies that Ruh is particularly proud of is GE’s PowerUp technology that promises to improve the output of wind turbines, “it is a series of technologies used to analyse information about every wind turbine on a farm and to dynamically adjust each and every one to optimise the wind speed.”

“When you do that we’ve found we can generate up to five percent more electricity per wind farm because of software, which adds twenty-five percent more profitability.”

“In the next generation of wind turbines all this kind of software is going to be embedded in it from the design phase through to the operational phase,” Ruh says. “It’s going to change how our customers are going to operate wind turbines.”

Building digital twins

Another aspect Ruh sees with the changes is how machines and data will work together where equipment or parts are shipped with a ‘digital twin’, a software representation of the device that lets the customer test scenarios on their computers.

“I can now do ‘what if’ analysis on that machine using its data and that’s going to change how things work. That takes everything from 3D modelling, to manufacturing, to maintenance to operations.”

Building on domain knowledge

Ultimately Ruh sees GE’s strength with the Industrial Internet being the company’s domain knowledge, “this world is different and you cannot come from outside and pretend you’re going to learn it as you go.”

“The way people buy equipment is totally different, we have equipment that’s eighty years old and we still support it. That’s totally different from the software world.”

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June 15, 2015
Dividing the Internet of Things
One thing that’s becoming clear in researching and writing on the Internet of Things is how three distinct strands of the concept exist due to the different needs of industry and the marketplace.

This is articulated best by Bill Ruh, the Vice President of GEs Global Software Center, who in an interview this week – which I’ll post later – suggested the IoT is best divided into the industrial internet, the enterprise internet and the consumer internet.

At the base level the consumer internet includes the bulk of startups and the devices that get most of the publicity; the Apple Watches, Nest thermostats and smart door locks.

Largely operating on a ‘best effort’ basis, consumer IoT vendors don’t guarantee service and security is often an afterthought. This is going to present a few challenges for both consumers and retailers as the inevitable problems arise.

Catering for the enterprise

The IT industry vendors are at the next level, the Enterprise internet, where companies like Microsoft, Cisco and VMWear are adapting their businesses to the cloud and Internet of Things.

At this level, which Cisco calls the Internet of Everything, the security and reliability challenges are understood and the practices of the IT and communications industry lend themselves to the widespread transmission of data from smart devices.

Similarly most of the telcos with their machine to machine (M2M) technologies fall into the enterprise internet camp.

Driving the industrial internet

While the enterprise vendors are providing robust systems, the IT industry levels of service don’t quite meet the needs of mission – and often life – critical applications found in jet engines, precision manufacturing and most industrial processes.

Providing that level of security, precision, reliability and low latency is where the industrial internet is applied. This is where the companies such as GE and the other big engineering companies come in.

At the industrial internet level it’s far harder for startups to disrupt the existing players as it requires both specialist knowledge of their industry sectors and deep pockets to provide the necessary capital for product development.

However the existing industrial conglomerates don’t have all the skills in house and that’s an opportunity for smaller companies and startups to enter the industry.

The long product times are another aspect of the industrial internet, as Rue points out, GE are still supporting equipment that is over eighty years old. While that equipment will probably never be connected to the internet, the machines being designed today will be expected to have similar lifespans.

While the three different IoTs have their own characteristics, and in many instances overlap, all three are opportunities for savvy developers and entrepreneurs.

The difficulty some businesses, both as vendors and customers, will face with the IoT is applying the wrong technology set to their problems and industry.

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May 16, 2015
How to make the IoT pay
How do companies sell the internet of things to consumers? This was the question at the opening panel of the Internet of Things World conference in San Francisco this morning.

Belkin’s Chief Technology Officer Brian van Harlingen took the lead in the panel stating that the opportunity lies in making sense out of the IoT’s complexity. “With data comes complexity, we have to make it simple for the end user,” said Van Harlingen

Van Harlingen’s view was backed up by Verizon’s Chief Data Scientist, Ashok Srivastava, who understandably sees the challenge of managing the information generated by masses of devices as being an opportunity for his company and data scientists in general.

That masses of data is being generated isn’t surprising seeing the other member of the morning’s panel was Jason Johnson, Co-founder and CEO of smart lock maker August. That the ordinary door lock may be generating masses of data indicates just how much information might be churning around the average smart home in the near future.

Cut out the complexity

It may well be that all of this data and complexity isn’t necessary as Joe Dada, the CEO and founder of smarthome company Insteon, point out. “Leave the network as quiet as you can,” is his advice. “People over-estimate the amount of data that needs to be pushed across the network.”

Dada, a twenty-five year veteran of the smarthome industry, sees the over-complication of the IoT as being a weakness in many of the products and business models being touted today with his company selling their products on being convenient, safe and fun.

While Dada has a successful business model, many of the other business don’t and exactly how to make money from the IoT wasn’t really answered by the panel.

Capturing efficiencies

It may well be that for many the answer lies in making existing products better, in talking to Cisco’s Brad Bechtold who runs the networking giant’s Oil and Gas Industry Transformation division estimates that there could be operational savings of up to 11% for the sector through implementing IoT technologies.

With estimates of the oil and gas industry’s size being around four trillion dollars a year, that represents an opportunity of over a hundred billion dollars a year in the one sector alone.

Selling the IoT

So it may be that the way to sell the Internet of Things into the industrial sector is to point out the operational savings available. Should the promise of substantial cost reductions be realised then it may even trigger a new wave of capital investment as businesses decide it’s easier to upgrade equipment than retrofit it.

The analytics and management aspect will turn out to be lucrative for many businesses as well, however the key to success is going to be demonstrating how these services add value for customers.

For the consumer market however the key probably lies in Joe Dada’s advice – keep it easy, convenient, safe and fun.

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May 13, 2015