Manufacturing and the "Internet of Things" [01Oct11] - 0 views
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“There’s been an ‘intranet of things’ in manufacturing for years now,” says Tony Paine, president of Kepware (www.kepware.com), a technology company in Yarmouth, Maine that develops communication and interoperability software for the automation industry. Explaining his statement, Paine points to the growing use of preventative and condition-based monitoring that are widely accepted, if not always implemented, by most manufacturers.
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“This is not just about connecting smart devices, this is about modeling all the things in your manufacturing world so that it’s easy to remix them in new ways to build new applications,” says Russ Fadel, chief executive officer of Thingworx (www.thingworx.com), a two-year-old company located in Exton, Pa. The company combines the key functionality of real-time data, mashups, search, social media and the semantic web, and applies it to any process that involves people, systems, devices and other real world “things.”
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“That kind of automated, connected response could save you, say, 3 percent on your utility bill,” Fadel says. “The ability to remix people and systems to interact with radical equality—this will be the source of some unexpected innovation. For manufacturers, the Internet of Things is not just about connecting your car to your alarm clock, it’s about creating a competitive advantage.”
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“Cellular wasn’t that popular a year and a half ago,” says Killian, “but that’s changed a lot with utilities and water/wastewater, in particular. Cellular technology is enabling users to monitor things that weren’t easily monitored in the past. On the wired side of things, I’ve heard of water districts wanting to run cable networks because Comcast can drop in broadband. So now they want hardened routers so they can run wired or wireless—and this is from guys who just recently were using dial-up 9600-baud modems. But with the access they now have to 3G, they’re getting onboard with what they can do with it. New technologies tend to force the use of better networking technologies.”