The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has recently held its bi-annual Steering Committee elections and now brings new leadership to the helm. Executives from Bosch, Real-Time Innovations, Huawei, and Dell EMC have been elected as the new leadership team of the IIC. The IIC is the largest Industrial IoT organization with an international scope and execution. The new IIC Steering Committee leadership team combines industrial giants from Europe, North America, and Asia with a fast-growing Silicon Valley company. It includes leaders in industry, IT, OT, and telecom. The new Steering Committee leadership team is:
- Chair: Dirk Slama, Vice President of Business Development, Bosch Software Innovations
- Vice Chair: Stan Schneider, CEO of Real-Time Innovations (RTI)
- Secretary: Wael William Diab, Senior Director, Huawei Technologies
- Testbed Subcommittee Chair: Dr. Said Tabet, Technology Lead, IoT and AI Strategy, Dell EMC
“Four years ago when we began the IIC, the IIoT was an emerging technology. The market has matured and businesses have realized that they can’t go it alone. As the industry's largest global IoT organization, the IIC brings together IT and OT stakeholders, government organizations and academia to accelerate the adoption of industrial IoT,” said Dirk Slama, IIC Steering Committee Chair and Vice President of Business Development, Bosch Software Innovations.
The impact of the IIoT touches every industry. The work of the IIC, such as the testbeds, foundational documents and liaison relationships, reflect that. Its 26 testbeds cut across many industries: airline baggage handling, energy grids, solar power, construction, manufacturing floor; and its technical papers serve as defacto industry guidelines like the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture; and it has developed relationships with other organizations through 36 liaisons and counting.
“The IIoT will create a bold new world of smart, connected systems. The IIC has the scale and momentum to drive this future. The market needs clear guidance and leadership; the IIC is in a unique position to provide it,” said IIC Steering Committee Vice Chair and Real-Time Innovations CEO Stan Schneider.
Although many companies are looking at levering IoT solutions, there are numerous barriers to adoption. Combined, these barriers can severely limit how quickly IIoT transforms the market. The IIC objective is to tear down these barriers and accelerate the adoption of the IIoT.
“The scale and complexity involved in architecting, developing and deploying IIoT systems require building out the industry ecosystem to include all the stakeholders. IIC, through its liaison program, is developing coalitions that include SDOs, government entities, open source communities and industry alliances focused on the various aspects of IT and OT. The effort reflects the collaborative approach of IIC, leverages all IIC work products and has included joint workshops to harmonize Industrial IoT requirements,” said Wael William Diab, IIC Steering Committee Secretary and Senior Director, Huawei Technologies.
Connectivity is a huge challenge for any organization looking at IIoT solutions. The biggest challenge is matching the connectivity framework architecture to the problem. The IIC has great guidance in the Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework (IICF), which was summarized into a very practical usage guide in a recent Journal of Innovation. Also within its Technology Working Group is its Networking Task Group, which is focused on the bottom three layers of the OSI stack and is looking to gather OT requirements as well as introduce IT solutions.
With architectures and standards there are a number of organizations working diligently to standardize IIoT solutions. IIC publishes requirements derived from IT stakeholders delivering horizontal technologies in conjunction with OT stakeholders distilling use cases. As an example, the recently published IIC Industrial Internet Analytics Framework (IIAF) is the first-of-its-kind blueprint that looks at the entire ecosystem from a decision maker’s point of view. IIC testbeds also use many industry standards and provide feedback on future requirements to the originating standards development organization.
The IT world moves very rapidly. A governance structure that allows for incubation of new technologies that enable IIoT is essential. The IIC Technology Working Group has fostered new areas like AI and Edge and is currently looking at new technologies in industrial applications.
“When it comes to trustworthiness it cannot be overstated how important societal concerns like security and privacy are in IIoT. Life and limb are at risk. These technical, business and ethical considerations are referred to as trustworthiness. Indeed, the IIC Industrial Internet Security Framework (IISF) deals with these and we have an active security group engaging in these discussions,” said Said Tabet, IIC Steering Committee Testbed Subcommittee Chair and Technology Lead for IoT and AI Strategy, Dell EMC.
The currency used between horizontal SDOs and vertical ones is use cases. IIC has developed a strong use case repository through its business strategy and solution lifecycle working group. It is essential for everyone to speak the same language when looking at a problem and use cases do just that.
Because no single organization can deliver the one standard that solves all interoperability problems, IIC is launching the Industrial Internet Interoperability Coalition (I3C). The goal of I3C is to identify interoperability hotspots that require special attention and position them on an IIoT interoperability heat-map. I3C is bringing partners together to address clusters of interoperability hotspots with an integrative, holistic perspective.
The IIC also co-founded the industry's largest event, the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona each fall. This show attracted 13,000 registrants last year and continues to scale. The IIC leadership team will be there and is happy to connect there.
Edited by
Ken Briodagh
