Mike Bryant, executive director of PI North America-the Profibus/Profinet promotion organization, began day two of the 2014 Annual General Meeting pondering what’s next for Profinet. After 20 successful years, what will propel growth for the next five or more.

A quick poll of the 70+ attendees showed unanimous agreement that the Internet of Things holds great potential for growth. A company, that also happens to be a PI North America member, that is a leading proponent of the Industrial Internet of Things and in fact is the founder of the Industrial Internet Consortium, is GE. Aussie Schnore, principal engineer with GE Global Research, presented GE’s point of view. Here are some of his thoughts.

  • Industrial Internet building on previous layers
  • Standards are important because now we have a spec to design from rather than re-inventing something
  • The GE Intelligent Platforms cycle is connected machines, connected data, connected insights, and connected people
  • Important trends in the next five years include retirements, 50 billion machines connected to Internet, new employees expect information at their fingertips, and CIOs expect to drive more business insight
  • Forces shaping the Industrial Internet include brilliant machines, big data, analytics
  • Challenges facing adoption of the Industrial Internet include performance, cyber security, scale, and interoperability
  • “Why it matters:” reduction in development time, lower support costs, increase in gross margin, leading to improved asset performance, enhanced customer experience, creation of new service and support models

This is exactly right on. Connectivity is now expected. Now how do we accomplish all the benefits.

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