Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware (Part 4)

Tony Paine: When you think of the oil and gas market where you have remote sites that are perhaps drilling wells, that information has been historically self-contained on the site and requires someone to be out there to take measurements. The thought is, that is not realistic going forward. The industry doesn’t have the same amount of experts for the same amount of remote sites. There’s been a big push over the years. They’re saying, “How do we take some of this information and figure out how to make it remotely accessible?” That’s been a progression. It wasn’t like somebody could dial-in and get real-time access anytime they wanted to. It may very well be that a site collects data for some days and then periodically connects to a central location and uploads the data as the first step to be able to give somebody remote visibility, but not necessarily on real-time.

Technologies have changed. Cellular networks have become more widespread. As technology is becoming less expensive, people are figuring out how to connect to these devices and actually get real-time data updates so as to make decisions in real-time. You’re seeing a lot of that in oil and gas. You see a lot of it in power where you’re going to have different infrastructures that are remote.

Waste water management is another one. You might actually have sensors that are detecting the quality of water and publishing results back to some central location. I’m keeping that location very generic. It could technically be a data center. It could be a single machine that’s running some application that’s collecting data and archiving it for regulatory usage. It could be a wide range of things.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the market has adopted Internet of Things in a serious way?

Tony Paine: I’d probably say that if you were to look at the industrial automation space, at least, 30% of companies out there are doing something that is IoT-like. They may be calling it IoT, remote monitoring, or predictive and preventive maintenance. There may be a lot of means that they’re using to basically do some of the same things that IoT promises.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware
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