Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware (Part 5)

Tony Paine: Where I think IoT really adds a lot of power is that we’re going to be able to take the same things that we do within a single organization, where an organization may have multiple campuses or sites, and cross organizational boundaries so that we can tie into the consumers of the goods that we sell, as well as to the suppliers who produce the raw materials for our parts. When I talk about scaling up and really leveraging the inter-connectivity of organizational data, that is still in its infancy.

Sramana Mitra: Let me try to synthesize that. Sensorification is happening faster than the analytics infrastructure and the ability to capture that data to actually be able to do interesting things with that data is still behind.

Tony Paine: Yes. Again, some of its limitations is how far can you make the data available. If you think of data that’s made available from an industrial process up to a plant level type of application within the same physical walls or the same site as the data that’s being produced, you have something very much geared towards what is needed to get the job done within the context of that site. When I think about rolling that data up across multiple sites and across multiple business units and being able to get visibility across all that, that’s definitely in its infancy.

Sramana Mitra: What kinds of open problems do you see out there that you would suggest entrepreneurs should be looking at?

Tony Paine: Standards. The thing that’s going to allow this to be as quick as they’d like to see it realized is the adoption of standards. That’s two-fold. How am I going to connect one endpoint to the next? Can we agree on one or, at least, a handful of communications media? Then, what’s going to be the format of the information that we’re going to share with each other, or what we typically call as, the protocol or the language? Those are two key things that really need to be solved in order to allow IoT to grow at a much rapid rate.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware
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