The Part Of The Internet You Don’t See Lets Machines Talk To Each Other—And Will Change The World

The "industrial Internet" is the idea of connecting millions of machines--railroad cars, wind turbines, MRI scanners, you name it--to a network, extending today’s connectivity to factories, hospitals, buildings, and much else.

According to Jon Bruner it is "machines becoming nodes on pervasive networks that use open protocols." And, to many others, it is as a big a deal as the Internet itself: essentially completing a job that’s only half-finished with web sites, email, Twitter, and so on. "The same changes in software and networks that brought about decades of Silicon Valley innovation are now reordering the machines around us," Bruner, an editor at O’Reilly Media, says. For a sense of what these changes might mean, take a look at Bruner’s excellent (and free) recent report. He writes about how the industrial Internet might improve efficiency and system visibility (allowing managers, for example, to understand their power supplies, as well as what’s happening in the factory). He explores some possible problems, notably around security. And he runs through dozens of examples of how it could affect particular industries.