jeudi 24 avril 2014

Industrial Internet Can't Succeed Without Big Data and Cloud, GE Says

A lire sur: http://www.cio.com/article/751015/Industrial_Internet_Can_t_Succeed_Without_Big_Data_and_Cloud_GE_Says

Hear the phrases 'Industrial Internet' or 'Internet of Things' and you probably think of billions of connected devices. That's all well and good, but without the computing power to assess all the data coming from these devices, GE suggests that enterprises won't realize the full potential of the industrial Internet.


By  , Thu, April 10, 2014

CIO — In 1998, when Paul Rogers started at GE, implementing optimization software at a coal-fired power plant was easier said than done. Management understood and worked with GE to develop the software. Within the plant itself, though, the vast majority of employees didn't know how to use a computer, let alone software, and were very suspicious of the system.
These days, says Rogers, now GE's chief development officer, the tables have turned. Smartphone-toting plant employees know firsthand how technology changes their lives as consumers — and they want to know why the industrial environment isn't like their home environment.
"They want to optimize equipment, and that's a sign that the world is ready," Rogers says. Put another way: "My daughter has radically different experiences about how the world works."

Industrial Internet Solving Obvious Problems and Unknown Ones

The tech industry sees the industrial Internet driving productivity and efficiency in a variety of verticals. In GE's case, it's the industries where it sells hardware as well as data management and analytics systems. These verticals include oil and gas, transportation and healthcare.
Each industry poses different challenges, says Rogers, who sat down with CIO.com earlier this year. The answers may seem obvious to technologists, but that's not always the case with industrialists. GE's aim, Rogers says, is to show industries how to first optimize assets and, having done that, optimize operations.
Oil firms, for example, used to "monitor" their wells by sending an employee out in a truck. Since most wells are in remote locations, and unmanned, it typically took three weeks to discover and fix pumps that had stopped running, Rogers says. For the "black gold" industry, this represented huge losses.
Placing sensors on the wells, or assets, solves the obvious problem: Companies know much sooner if a well runs dry. This also brought additional benefits, Rogers says — data from the sensors, stored in the cloud and analyzed by Web-based research and development tools, lets firms study the overall efficiency of an oil field.
The industrial internet has a similar impact in transportation. Here, again, the initial focus was an asset (in this case, freight cars). Firms started by optimizing individual routes — cresting hills, for example, to save fuel — before turning to entire networks, where trains can spend up to two-thirds of their time idling.

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