
GE discovers that industrial IoT doesn't scale - tdrnd
http://mailchi.mp/iotpodcast/stacey-on-iot-if-ge-cant-master-industrial-iot-who-can
======
csours
I work in Automotive Manufacturing IT. Something left unsaid about IIoT is
that when the business needs something, they go and buy it. There is no plan
for IIoT, there sometimes isn't even a plan for IT.

All of your pretty analytics won't do jack if all you get back is -999. Things
get complicated the closer you get to the metal, so systems are installed and
configured to work, and then you back away slowly and don't breathe on it.

Eventually you have a plant full of things that look very similar from the
front office, but once you dig in, all of the interesting stuff is completely
different, and different in different ways.

~~~
joezydeco
I currently working in foodservice equipment, and I'll concur with this.

The problem with IoT isn't the backend. There are plenty of companies that
figured out the servers, ingestion, security, dashboarding, etc.

The problem is all the nodes. Customers aren't going to replace equipment with
newer systems just because it has IoT capabilities, which means you're
attempting to retrofit machinery with sensors and connectivity. Or else you
wait until the major chain customer has refreshed every single piece of
equipment in every store. Set your calendar for 7-10 years and check back in.

For retrofitting, every single case is different, it's custom, and 90% of the
time it's not easy. And, no, slapping a Raspberry Pi to the side of a
milkshake freezer isn't the answer. Some products like Helium are closer, but
an array of open-collector GPIOs isn't the answer either.

The only way to win here is to be _highly_ vertical and close to your
customers not only in business knowledge but actual integration with the
equipment makers. I certainly don't see GE, MS, AWS, Google or anyone else
really making the commitment to that kind of stuff.

~~~
petra
>> For retrofitting, every single case is different, it's custom, and 90% of
the time it's not easy. And, no, slapping a Raspberry Pi to the side of a
milkshake freezer isn't the answer. Some products like Helium are closer, but
an array of open-collector GPIOs isn't the answer either.

>> 90% of the time it's not easy

Why ?

And maybe the right approach is a marketplace approach ?

Say i'm an someone who have created a node for fridge X, at my local town.
allow me to upload designs of hardware(or maybe standard programmable hw, what
makes sense), software, cables, documentation, maybe verification - and to
sell them to anybody, easily.

And when someone orders such designs, the marketplace sends him everything
fully working with simple installation instructions ?

~~~
extrapickles
That will work for some of it.

Quite a bit of industrial stuff is one offs, were you have the only one(s) in
existence. I've made devices for industrial use were the customer only needed
1-5 of them.

~~~
petra
For those types of devices, do you think a board built around something like a
PSOC chip(fully programmable analog+digital+mcu chip) or something improved
along those lines, give enough programmability to cover plenty of such devices
and help implementers ?

~~~
nine_k
The hardware might be fine. With the software, it's already harder, it needs
adaptation, if not writing from scratch. With sensors, it's fitting them to
the unique mechanical circumstances of the one-off machine. And both if these
you can't scale, can't reuse.

------
alexandros
I guess we're ruling out that GE might not have done a great job building a sw
platform, and moving straight to "it can't be done, nobody can do it".

(Disclaimer: founder of horizontal IIoT startup, scaling just fine)

~~~
jo909
I think the "scaling" is not about the software platform or connectivity etc,
but that it's hard enough to transfer what you learned from the sensor data of
a gas powered turbine to the sensor data of a steam powered turbine, and of
course even harder or impossible to the pump motor in an ice cream
manufacturing plant.

And there are millions of different pumps, motors, gears and whistles and
their parameters and environment is so specific to the industry and actual
machine.

It does not scale to offer the same thing "horizontally" across all
industries. So they don't offer generalized "industrial" IoT to power plants
and ice cream manufacturers alike, but focus on a few industries they know
well.

You can of course call yourself horizontal across all industries if your
offering ends at the software platform or some other building block, but that
is apparently not what industrial clients are buying. They buy a wholesome
solution.

------
benwilber0
> Since launching its industrial IoT effort five years ago, GE has spent
> billions selling the internet of things to investors, analysts and
> customers.

> spent _billions_

Does that seem realistic to anyone? I'm sure they've spent a lot of money, but
_billions_? Even if it's a single "billion" that's basically 1/25th of GE's
total worth.

edit: Stacey sourced from [http://www.ge.com/ar2016/ceo-
letter/beyond/](http://www.ge.com/ar2016/ceo-letter/beyond/)

~~~
comicjk
According to this site [1], GE spent $393 million on advertising in 2014. So I
would say billions on any one product line over 5 years is improbable. Maybe
half a billion is believable.

[1] [http://adage.com/article/advertising/big-spenders-facts-
stat...](http://adage.com/article/advertising/big-spenders-facts-stats-
top-200-u-s-advertisers/299270/)

------
maxbaines
I / my company was founded 10years back we focus on CNC Machines specifically.
Recently with one our our clients we’ve been working with three leading iIot
solutions; some mentioned in the article (we provide the data from the machine
into there platforms) six months into the project it is really evident, domain
knowledge is key to success. I believe there is an expectation that analytics,
Machine Learning, Big Data etc can be applied without the knowledge and
results can be delivered. The problem is automation equipment is not / has not
been designed to deliver data at a scale this technology can be applied
successfully, domain knowledge is still required to make it a success.
Shameless plug www.cncdata.co.uk

~~~
Piskvorrr
Yours might be the most salient point: "Let's just sprinkle it with magic IoT
dust, abracadabra, profit!!!" is evident cargo cult, but still manages to find
traction.

------
siscia
Since we are talking about IoT and market I would like to ask you guys to
share some thoughts..

I am actually focusing quite a lot on IoT in general.

I was lucky enough to land a quite interesting contract to manage a LoRaWAN
architecture, I learned every trick of one open source implementation[1] (big
shout out to brocaar who is the author) and now I am considering selling my
expertise as a product.

So providing for a flat monthly fee all my knowledge in running such system
plus my expertise about LoRa in general.

Then I will segment the market considering the number of devices that an user
need:

1\. Extremely cheap (50€/month), sharing the resources with other tenants and
best effort email support for less the 50 remote nodes

2\. Quite expensive (5000€/month) for a High Available, scalable and isolated
architecture (plus guarantee support) for whoever needs to manage more nodes.

Do you believe this is a viable solution or I should focus on something
different?

[1]:
[https://github.com/brocaar/loraserver](https://github.com/brocaar/loraserver)

~~~
BraveNewCurency
You might be a bit early (especially in the USA), but I think helping people
implement LoRa will be a massive market. (Bigger than setting up WiFi networks
for companies back in the day.) It covers a unique niche between GSM and WiFi
that just couldn't be solved until now.

I think your segmentation is way to rough. There is a ton of space between the
farm with a few hundred nodes to manage, and Nest with a few million nodes.

People are just learning best practices to manage a few thousand web servers.
Managing a few thousand brickable devices with KBs of RAM is more challenging.

~~~
siscia
You definitely have a point on the segmentation, however, there was a
rationale behind it.

It seems to me quite unlikely that someone will buy only the software and not
the hardware, I believe that most of these systems will be installed by some
vertical company that will sell both hardware and software. And I honestly
don't have the knowledge, nor the capital, to set up a vertical company around
(say agriculture).

It ends up to understand what should be my customers and I am afraid they
won't be the final user of the system.

My customers are technical, I provide them with digital data that they should
somehow consume and it is not an easy task...

~~~
lifeisstillgood
My thoughts are that no-one will invest in hundreds or thousands of nodes till
they have seen and bought and used a dozen - and the supplier of the prototype
will almost certainly be the supplier for the rest.

For many companies the sales channel to this _might_ be the it agency
(postlight type of company) - so I would suggest selling your expertise to
these guys first.

~~~
siscia
I agree with you, whoever will provide the first working prototype will
provide the whole system.

What you mean by postlight type of company?

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Postlight is a NYC based agency that do "initial digital MVPs" or similar -
taking companies to a starting point for some new venture - do a good ish
podcast - search iTunes

------
grok2
It's not clear from the article what doesn't scale -- is it that businesses
stretch themselves too thin or is it that making a platform that encompasses
any and every use case is not a viable business model or is it that the
software technology itself doesn't scale? Anyone know?

~~~
CharlesW
> _It 's not clear from the article what doesn't scale…_

This is the main problem with the article IMO.

Many IIoT technologies and platforms will be used across vastly different
industries. Others will be industry-specific. As they always have, industry-
specific vendors will integrate industry-specific elements with more
"scalable" elements to provide complete solutions for specific customers.

OTOH, every _complete_ IIoT _solution_ will be bespoke. Sales, marketing, and
integration will not be scalable.

~~~
ethbro
_> OTOH, every complete IIoT solution will be bespoke. Sales, marketing, and
integration will not be scalable._

This is what Palantir learned, and what Oracle semi-avoided in their
positioning:

Your scalable solution is worthless without last-mile integration, and that
integration is always bespoke.

Is the IIoT pushing for interface standards, a la SQL?

That would seem the main way to scale and extract the kind of revenue they're
looking for. Create a standard (and therefore market) for smaller fish to
perform the integration, such that it lifts the data up a level and products
can be built that operate against diverse sources.

~~~
warrenm
>Your scalable solution is worthless without last-mile integration, and that
integration is always bespoke.

Yep. And always has been.

Spreadsheets are a great metaphor for this ... or an artist's canvas. They're
both capable of amazing things being done on/in them ... but only with the
application of custom effort.

------
Aloha
I'm going to ask a dumb question - what's the difference between traditional
SCADA systems and IIoT?

~~~
csours
Branding and philosophy. SCADA is meant to do _something in particular_ ; IIoT
is meant to be _cloud of devices to do whatever you need._ but at the end of
the day,you still have to do _something in particular_

~~~
Aloha
so from my perspective then an unconfigured SCADA system is now an IIoT :-P

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Setting up an unconfigured SCADA makes you an IdIoT?

------
nickpsecurity
Companies such as Green Hills Software and Lynx Software Technology have real-
time OS's + middleware that have been used in all kinds of industrial
deployments.

[https://ghs.com/](https://ghs.com/)

[http://www.lynx.com/](http://www.lynx.com/)

Maybe the problem is that General Electric is a mega-corporation instead of a
company with tons of experience developing embedded software in many markets.
It helps to really understand the domain and what users want when developing
solutions. Also, only so much can be re-used. Each embedded project is partly
a custom job with the amount of customization depending on the use case.

~~~
jessaustin
Suddenly the odd recruiting TV ads make more sense...

[http://www.adweek.com/creativity/getting-hired-ge-
impresses-...](http://www.adweek.com/creativity/getting-hired-ge-impresses-
absolutely-no-one-companys-amusing-new-ads-166760/)

------
spraak
> For example, Samsara, a startup that formed in 2015

I wonder why you'd want to name your company Suffering?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra_(Buddhism...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra_\(Buddhism\))

~~~
vkrm
There are other connotations to Samsara - in contemporary Telugu and Tamil it
is colloquially used for 'universe' and 'family' as well.

~~~
patkai
Given most of the comments in this thread "IoT = universe of suffering" is not
a bad name, actually.

------
crusso
GE spent a shit-ton of money trying to jump into the smart grid business too.
They had commercials on television, but never really any products that went
anywhere in the market. GE's failures shouldn't be overly generalized.

------
stillfinite
In hardware, if too much of the product has to be customized or there is too
much variation, you can only win by being Oracle, charging exorbitant amounts
to a small set of customers. The market in industrial IoT is not nearly so
concentrated, and so the best strategy is probably to pick some lucrative
subfield and expand around that. Try to make products that cover everything
and you will just get killed by unit economics. But there is no gigantic,
homogenous market like "all humans with a disposable income" that the iPhone
got to cover, so IoT will always be somewhat competitive.

------
slededit
This has worked for Jet engines but those are uniquely well suited.

Nobody wants the engine to stop mid air and they are incredibly complex and
expensive so the costs of realtime monitoring are worth it.

------
erikb
If you have a specific system at hand you can say if it contains IoT or not
because in the sum all IoT systems have some commonalities. But you cannot
build a platform for it because the parts are so very different. The most
common thing is that there are some programs that send data over a network
which then is collected and analysed. The general purpose platform for that
already exists and is called "internet". But as you might've guessed: we
already have that.

------
prions
I believe we'll see more interesting solutions in industrial IOT when 5G
becomes more widespread and industries can start touching problems that lower
latency and higher bandwidth wireless can tackle.

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
Can you give an example?

With LTE you get less than 5ms latency, while 5G is promising less than 1ms.
However, I think those numbers are under ideal conditions. AFAIK, there's no
latency guarantee. Since I'm not familiar with the landscape, I'm having a
hard time understanding what kinds of problems are bottlenecked by an
hypothetical ~4ms?

The bandwidth improvements are huge, but there's no mention of guaranteed
speeds, nor do they mention if the quoted speeds apply to both upload and
download. It also important to remember that mobile data is incredibly
expensive.

------
atomical
Soo... Uptake not looking like a great company then?

------
gcb0
somebody forgot to tell that to Mirai.

------
messo
GE should look into IOTA. They seem to have solved the issue of scaling rather
well.

------
laythea
The problem _should_ be the ability to sift through and recognize patterns in
the massive amounts of data collected, in a manner that provides value to end
users. The problem of data (IO) collection/remote collection is long solved.
This is what happens when the focus is wrongly placed on how the data is
collected rather than what to do with the data when you have it.

