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Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a new milestone in contemporary industrialization, which redistributes manufacturing companies’ impact on the market.

Industrial Internet of Things is mainly of interest to enterprises seeking leadership by dumping prices and cost optimization. This is now becoming possible due to production automation and raw materials economy through integration with intelligent systems.

Victor Polyakov, CEO of Tibbo Systems, a leading manufacturer of AggreGate IoT Integration Platform and various IIoT hardware, has outlined his vision of the Internet of Things prospects to the IoT Tech Expo Europe 2016 organizers.

1. Please share what you think about the Industrial IoT prospects in general?

First of all, we need to decide what we call the Industrial Internet of Things. In my view, almost the whole industrial automation world can now be referred to the Industrial IoT, as only very few industrial networks are 100% isolated from the Internet.

IIoT is also the right term for unification and globalization of various markets, including IT, automation, physical security and others. All IIoT events bring together experts from various industries and market niches, which have rarely occurred in past years. The expert exchange drives mutual penetration of various technologies between diverse IIoT markets. For example, IT guys are starting to use «network HMIs» that came from industrial and building automation area, while SCADA guys are quickly adopting new enterprise-grade data storage and processing technologies (NoSQL and, speaking broadly, Big Data).

This technology exchange taking place in the name of IoT enables rapid growth of all high-tech markets and this trend will likely continue in the coming years. We’ll see hundreds of new cross-industry products and services that became possible since IoT started unifying the world.

2. What types of IoT platforms exist today and where are they mostly applied?

The market of IoT platforms can be divided into two broad categories.

The first is infrastructure platforms (such as Microsoft Azure) that provide low-level services (e.g. event collection and processing) and SDK to develop end cloud applications (portals) for the Internet of Things. Such platforms are well suited for implementing the control and monitoring of simple household IoT devices.

The second category includes end-to-end platforms providing a complete set of services for building IoT applications without programming: data collection, storage, processing and visualization, as well as integration of this data into enterprise-level systems. Examples of such platforms are PTC Axeda / ThingWorx or our Tibbo AggreGate.

3. What Industrial IoT technologies will be available in the near future?

Actually, at this moment merging of industrial automation and “cloud” worlds is moving into top gear. Management and monitoring of distributed industrial facilities is centralized and performed remotely, while small customers tend to require less conservative and more state-of-the-art technologies. For example, we often hear that partners need to set up a boiler room equipment from a smartphone, which is not yet required for SCADA system deployment at a CHP factory.

Accordingly, there will be a number of new industrial protocols as well as versions of classic ones allowing to transfer data over the public Internet and consider cellular and satellite channels with lack of static IP addresses, lower speed and constantly low reliability of data transfer.

Moreover, some technologies aimed at improving security of industrial communications are coming up on stage nowadays. This is critical when industrial data goes into open networks.

And surely we should expect changes in equipment itself, such as integration of GPRS / 3G / LTE modules into industrial controllers which used to hang in a wiring closet with a plugged-in Ethernet-cable.

Meet Victor and see the Tibbo products at the IoT Tech Expo Europe Exhibition, stand number 27