Mike Boudreaux, director of connected services at Emerson, and Andy Rhodes, VP and GM of IoT at Dell, spoke at our studio during an Austin IIoT meetup group session.
The session began with a general discussion of where the two companies see themselves within the industrial “internet of things.”
“Emerson is focused on developing connected services, collecting sensor information in a number of verticals, getting it into the cloud, into the hands of experts, deploying analytics and delivering actionable information for customers related to performance and reliability improvements,” Boudreaux said. “The industry applications we are focused on now are primarily refining chemicals, oil- and gas-type applications where they have critical equipment and require performance and reliability improvement to deliver significant savings, increase throughput, but preventing unplanned shutdowns and lower maintenance costs.”
Dell breaks IIoT down into real-life use cases by looking at each individual vertical, placing business value into four major buckets: driving efficiency in automation; safety; customer experience; and net new revenue streams and business models.
Dell uses its gateway solutions to attempt to relieve pressures put on the cloud from having to house huge amounts of data. It uses edge analytics to speed up processes, decrease cost and improve connectivity, and deploys everything from the gateway to the back-end data center.
The two presenters talked about their partnership and how partnering with companies is an essential element in IoT.
“Anyone that says they do it all is either diluted or a liar,” Rhodes said. “It comes back to my statement that IoT is a theme, it is a set of use cases. So you have to have people who have domain knowledge in their use case – experts in cold supply chain, industrial, building management.”
Before closing with questions, Rhodes and Boudreaux agreed on the two biggest challenges in IoT: security and the business case.
“We have surveyed our customers on this and the two most important challenges that come up every time are security and the business case,” Boudreaux said. “You have to have security, there are models and ways to implement security. One of the things people are struggling with is identifying the business case for the investment and infrastructure required. What Emerson is doing is focusing on very specific industry problems related to reliability performance improvement, and we will build business cases and work with them to collaborate to build that investment.
Read more about how Dell and Emerson work together to deploy an IIoT solution here.
