Last week Silicon Valley Bank opened their doors to the IoT Forum to host a meeting on Industrial IoT, sponsored by Foghorn. Because of the dropping cost and increasing accuracy of sensors, connectivity to those sensors, cloud computing, and analytics systems, IIoT is capturing the interest of telco, vendors, and investors who want to ride the industry 4.0 wave.
Yukon Palmer, the President of FieldLogix, demonstrated examples of IIoT deployed in field resource management, where applying IoT and analytics to logistics improved customer opex instantly and significantly. Prakash Sangam, from Tantra Analyst, walked attendees through all the hard work that 5G still has to go through with stabilizing features and achieving future releases in order to truly support the vision of industry 4.0.
The panel including Foghorn’s CTO Sastry Mallado and Twilio’s Principal Product Manager Vijay Devarapalli tried to look further in to the future, but agreed that we are still in early innings and the challenges to mainstream adoption are still ahead of us before the cross the chasm. Greg Mischou, Managing Director at Atlas Technology Group, who led this discussion, brought up the transformative potential of AI in delivering agility and reminded us that IIoT will be different than previous generations of industrial control because IT and OT will be (should be?) aligned.
IoT Forum members and guests were then introduced to 8 new companies and technologies who brought ideas to the tables from SIM management and cyber security to edge compute and predictive analytics.