How the industrial Internet will help you to stop worrying and love the data

[Commentary] We are at the cusp of another metamorphic change that will spawn new business models, new jobs and new operational efficiencies: The industrial internet, the convergence of contextual data, people and brilliant machines. Whether we’re discussing the consumer internet or the industrial internet, a new challenge arises with the seemingly endless proliferation of connected devices and intelligent machines: Big data.

The next leap forward for industry will be all about more agile development, mastering data science and becoming proficient at repeatable processes. There is a need to create software and a platform that is equivalent, if not better, than what current consumer companies have built. Because industrial data is growing at two times the rate of any other big data segment, integration and synchronization of data and analytics, often in real-time, are needed in industry more than in other sectors. Industrial businesses require a big data platform with common software and hardware standards, optimized for these unique characteristics.

There are six capabilities that industrial companies must adopt as part of their business strategy to be successful in this new era:
1) Data collection and aggregation
2) Advanced analytics at the point of need
3) Cloud-agnostic, deployment independence: a highly flexible deployment architecture that allows them to mix and match technology deployment methods – and avoid vendor lock-in
4) Extensibility and customizability
5) Orchestration
6) Modern user experience

[Ruh is VP of GE’s Software and Analytics Center]