This is day two of my journey into Rockwell Automation land. I attended parts of the Process Solutions User Group (PSUG) yesterday and had many valuable hallway conversations.

Rockwell presents an annual media day on the day before Automation Fair—the huge trade show devoted to Rockwell and its partners. Rockwell executive intend this meeting to present key trends and drivers of manufacturing (and production if you are a semantic purist) to assembled media and analysts. This morning Keith Nosbusch, CEO, presented his vision of the future based on the connectivity inherent in the Internet of Things. Looking at his theme of “The Connected Enterprise,” I could not have chosen a better name for my new business (The Manufacturing Connection, in case you got here by mistake).

Here are few highlights of Nosbusch’s talk.

“We are at an inflection point driven by convergence of control and information technologies including IoT that we call ‘The Connected Enterprise.’ “

Trends:

* Population growth, 70 million people annually will become middle class adding to consumer spend thus requiring the manufacture of more goods;
* This places increased demand on industrial prodution putting stress on more water, more vehicles, more steel, more energy, commodity scarcity;
* Higher standard of living and quality of life demands a more productive, sustainable enterprise.

Enablers:

* Cloud-traffic will increase 6x in 2 years necessitating more bandwidth, infrastructure developent;
* Mobility-standard IP-based networking facilitates, device and people connectivity and collaboration;
* Big data analysis-to support collaboration, decision-making, note that manufacturing generates more big data than any other sector;
* Smart things-data has been trapped in the assets due to proprietary and closed networks and systems, integrated control and information solutions from Rockwell exist with standard networking protocols to enable analytics and distribution of information;
* Security-common secure network is a key component of the connected enterprise from the plant to business applications.

Analysts think the economy of the Internet of Things could reach $14 Trillion within just a couple of years.

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