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Make IIoT Easy On Yourself

June 26, 2022 by Jay Cuthrell rroa analytics

Dionne Warwick - “Make It Easy On Yourself” (1973)

Getting Informed

Before we get into RRoA, RPoA, and IIoT, let’s set the stage a bit.

Breaking up is so very hard to do 🎶

At scale, annoyances become stifling. At scale, automation compounds productivity.

If you are reading this, you’ve probably heard of the Internet of Things (IoT). Maybe you have noodled with IoT concepts or work with IoT day to day.

If not, imagine the occasional human interactive access to a machine, updating a spreadsheet, turning on a light, and using a stapler. Now, add immense scale, exponential data growth, time-sensitive requirements, high-stakes expectations for automation, and the complexities of our physical world in a mine, factory, or other industrial setting.

Welcome to the next industrial revolution. And this next industrial revolution will only be possible through the Ruthless Removal of Annoyances (RRoA) and Relentless Pursuit of Automation (RPoA).

Oh, and here comes Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) aka Industry 4.0.1

No words of consolation will make me miss you less 🎶

Now, let’s set a stage for standards and automation.2

One aspect of IoT is thatmachines are increasingly shifting to the extended edges of the network as “tolerance for latency” continues to plummet?3

When considering latency4, let’s be clear that IIoT places emphasis on an industrial perspective for IoT. Use cases matter, and IIoT requirements are greater than that of general IoT.5

Indeed, often the RRoA results in the RPoA and this will apply our IIoT future. On our collective IIoT journey, the standards being defined will enable essential automation to proliferate.

Here are some examples to consider:

The Open Group Open Process Automation Standard (O-PAS)6 seeks to bring “federated process automation systems” to all the industrial plants.7 As such, O-PAS will impact everything from mining to chemical processing to the sources for what things are made of in the future.8
OPC Unified Architecture, or OPC UA, and Field Level Communication Initiative9 involves standards and requirements for automation. Also, TSN Industrial Automation Conformance Collaboration, or TIACC, is working on time-sensitive networking profiles for industrial automation.

The footnotes below go deeper into the RRoA and RPoA required for our IIoT future.10 Also, there are a couple of quotes to remember:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
— Arthur C. Clark 11

“Any sufficiently advanced product is indistinguishable from marketing.”
— Jay Cuthrell 12

For example, consider this superb infographic depicting generic IoT data pipelines from Satish Chandra Gupta aka @scgupta.13

So, while IIoT has great requirements than IoT, we can expect AWS, Azure, and GCP to decide if they will enable RRoA and RPoA for our IIoT future. For perspective:

Place your bets on which hyperscaler commits to participating in our IIoT future…

Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that cloud is an operating model not a place. As such, expect our IIoT future to be derived from RRoA and RPoA applied to use cases meant for the appropriate place to take advantage of the appropriate operating model within the appropriate time-sensitive architectures.