Event Recap: Smart Industry Conference 2016
Last week I attended my first Internet of Things-themed conference as VP of Marketing at Mission Data. The Smart Industry 2016 conference in Chicago focused on Industrial IoT (IIoT) and featured workshops and presentations from large manufacturers like Siemens and Intel, smaller manufacturers, and a cross-section of consultants and industry experts.
The first day included a tour of DMDII (Digital Manufacturing Design and Innovation Institute, a mouthful, I know). The tour featured several large manufacturing stations with big machines that were using sensors and data to track and enhance the manufacturing process. The coolest part of the tour was a few augmented reality stations where you could assemble a tool or object using AR as a guide. This is clearly an area where there will be a great deal of opportunity in the future (and one that Mission Data is experimenting with) and it was impressive to see the kinds of applications where this could be used.
The meat of the conference began on day 2 with several interesting keynotes. An industry consultant spoke of different business models for IIoT and the perspective of CEOs who are excited about IIoT’s ability to create new revenue models, not just in making incremental process improvements. Several other presentations across the day echoed this sentiment, however, most of the practitioner presentations seemed to focus more on the process improvement side of things.
The second keynote featured the quintessential black t-shirt wearing start-up CEO waxing poetic about the future. It was mostly an infomercial for his IoT start-up, however, he did make one interesting comment about how most consumer- oriented IoT conferences are having thousands of attendees while this one had only a few hundred. This seems spot on as Mission Data has been working with Kroger on IoT applications for years. This observation aligns with my own view that while IoT is a hot buzzword in the industrial space, very few companies have figured out how to truly transform their business in the ways that their CEOs have hoped. But it is still early yet in this revolution. Additional sessions that day included in the weeds discussions about standards, the merging of IT and OT (operations technology), and of course, cyber security.
Day 3 featured an interesting and in-depth view on Siemens’ digital strategy from their Chief Digital Officer. Clearly, this is a company that has an IoT strategy and is leading the industrial pack (albeit with lots of resources put toward it). The balance of the day featured talks on talent and the skills gap, which is clearly a challenge for this sector.
Overall, the conference left me with the same impressions I had before it started — that while IoT holds a lot of promise for the industrial manufacturing sector, the industry has a long way to go to develop transformative revenue-generating applications. One thing is clear though — there will be winners and losers and the ones that figure it out the fastest will see tremendous success and realize outsized gains, while the rest will become scraps on the machine shop floor.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Smart Industry Conference, you can follow highlights on Twitter by searching #SmartInd16. Have a vision for an IoT product you want built? Drop us a line at info@missiondata.com.
