Making Sense of IIoT Analytics

As the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) picks up steam, attention is pivoting from connectivity to analytics, flooding manufacturers with a wave of new offerings that all promise to facilitate real business change. Startups as well as familiar automation providers are pulling together new platforms and tools designed to spin the treasure trove of data collected from plant floor equipment and industrial assets into nuggets of actionable insights that can help optimize decision-making. Much of this data has existed in some form for decades, but it's primarily been locked away in siloed and incompatible plant floor systems. As a result, the data has never been fully utilized as part of a broader analytics effort to foster predictive maintenance, optimize energy usage of plant floor assets, or to initiate a response to critical events like a water leak or pump failure to minimize lost production. "It's really easy to capture data, but to then make that data actionable is where companies are really struggling," notes Ryan Lester, director of IoT strategy for Xively, an IoT platform provider.