Ecmweb 7719 Internet Things 2
Ecmweb 7719 Internet Things 2
Ecmweb 7719 Internet Things 2
Ecmweb 7719 Internet Things 2
Ecmweb 7719 Internet Things 2

Spinning a New Web

Aug. 18, 2015
As the scope of the Internet of Things widens, the task of building the electrical infrastructure to support it gets more attention. Electrical services providers will be faced with navigating this challenging terrain.  

General Electric Company might have retired its iconic advertising slogan, “We bring good things to life,” too soon.

Some 12 years on, many of the capital and consumer goods “things” GE and companies like it make — and many, many more — are indeed springing to life. So much so that an equally apt slogan for what’s happening today in the dynamic world of machine intelligence, automation, and remote control/monitoring might well be something along the lines of, “We bring life to things.”

lixuyao/iStock/Thinkstock

Thanks to advances in digital communications and sensor technology, inanimate objects of all sorts are gaining a more vivid and robust digital voice in the form of translatable, actionable data. Transformed, they’re able to convey essential status, performance and operational information far and wide. From lighting systems and electrical service panels and meters in an office building to banks of servers in a data center, it’s now conceivable to wire and network for real-time communication anything and everything powered and performing a function.

The popular shorthand for this is “The Internet of Things (IoT),” or more audaciously “The Internet of Everything.” It’s a web of digital networking and connectivity that mimics the vast World Wide Web ecosystem that’s evolved to become a virtual living, breathing repository of highly accessible information rooted not in human, but machine language. With the ability to communicate inside this mushrooming IoT, things equipped with digital sensors and even through distinct IP addresses are rapidly springing to a new interactive dimension of life. They may be lacking a soul, but certainly not for things to say that can be translated with the aid of powerful software to yield potent, actionable information for their human masters.

All of the estimates for the growth trajectory of the IoT point to relentless expansion. Technology trends watcher, Gartner, Inc., places the number of connected things — not counting pure communications devices like PCs, smartphones, and tablets — at close to 5 billion this year. That’s fully 30% more than were thought to be in existence in 2014. In five years, it estimates, the number could quintuple, hitting 25 billion. Cisco, the networking company on IoT’s leading edge, estimates the number closer to 50 billion, while Internet researcher IDATE forecasts 80 billion if communications devices are included. The broad economic impact of that many connected things, counting benefits derived across the spectrum from their installation and usage, could be transformative. McKinsey Global Institute pegs it at between $2.7 trillion and $6.2 trillion by 2025.

A tantalizing opportunity

What may justify that stunning number is the highly valuable information and insight that sensor technology could deliver to users — and the revenue and profits awaiting those who design and install the IoT’s technology backbone.

With the ability to deeply understand the operation of a device, machine, or component individually and as part of an entire infrastructure, users seize a chance to take performance optimization to a new level, potentially reducing operational costs and appreciably enhancing productivity. Meanwhile, from the perspective of product and service providers, building out the IoT is potentially lucrative. Consulting, design and installation services that span the software, sensor, networking gear, server and related computer hardware, power service, and maintenance and reliability infrastructure that makes it all possible is a veritable gold mine.

In the broad electrical services space, opportunities clearly abound for companies that understand the scope of what’s required to fashion the extensively monitored, connected, and networked environment that will define the emerging IoT. Electrical engineers, systems designers, and contractors will find ample demand in traditional application work, especially as power consumption, management and reliability demands change to reflect the enhanced computational power needed for more  data collection, analysis, and dissemination. But they’ll also increasingly benefit from a strong knowledge base in the computer technology and digital communications sphere. That’s because the line between IT and OT (operational technology) is blurring with the advent of sensor- and communications-enabled equipment capable of generating data.

Bill Mazzetti, senior vice president and chief engineer at Rosendin Electric, Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based contractor, has witnessed the steady growth of reliance on data and the demand for infrastructure that can manage it smartly. His firm is heavily involved in building out varied applications related to the IoT, notably data centers that play a downstream, yet central role in producing the ultimate answers the IoT seeks to provide.

“The society around us and businesses around us are changing rapidly in how they consume and interface with data, and that has a direct effect on the buildings we’re building as well as the infrastructure that’s behind it,” he says. “We’re finding that in a lot of these buildings the telemetry we need in an electrical system is now starting to equal — on a controls and monitoring basis — that needed for the mechanical system.”

As the IoT takes shape, Mazzetti says, electrical services suppliers will be required to bring to the table a deeper understanding of how operational systems data is generated, collected, analyzed, and shared. Since this entire data puzzle will have a “profound” impact on next-generation facilities design and installation, Mazzetti says, the electrical infrastructure is going to wind up looking very different from the days when the focal point was structured cable. Suppliers of products and services will have to be able to envision and help deliver entirely new concepts and solutions, especially for those growing numbers of clients eager to dive ever deeper into IoT applications.

“You may have been a solid electrical contractor or engineer working for the same customer for 10 or 15 years, but now you’re being looked to for new answers,” Mazzetti says. “The customer may even be a real student of the game and have an excellent CIO and facilities staff, but they’re going to look to you and ask, ‘what should I really be worried about; can I solve my network problems without wirelines; can it be handled with a wireless system; and can you provide the security for it?’”

But in all likelihood, rolling out the IoT on the pace envisioned will demand a coordinated team effort that incorporates many players with different skill and knowledge sets. Electrical experts of all stripes will have an important role, but so, too, will IT software, hardware, and networking professionals; automation, mechanical, and process engineers; and facilities management experts, to name a few.

The process of incorporating data gathering and communications capabilities into billions of things, and devising a way to make that real-time information generated truly valuable through calculated interpretation and dissemination could be a Herculean task, but an eminently worthwhile investment.

A computing challenge

Electrical product and service suppliers, working with expanded IT knowledge and more closely with IT professionals, will contribute at all levels. Their designs and installations will be central in the effort to ensure that IoT operational data coming from sensored components achieves a clear purpose: boost efficiency, reliability and predictability, and, ultimately, the bottom line.

A cornerstone of that effort is designing and building an infrastructure in which data can be reliably captured. With sensors generating potentially massive volumes of data, methods of gathering, storing, and accessing it become more critical. The need for servers and the computing power to handle the data crunching could overwhelm existing on-site resources, and require massive build-outs or, more likely, more extensive use of off-site data centers.

Rajan Battish, vice president of the mission critical group at RTKL Associates, a Baltimore consulting engineering firm, says the computing demands spawned by the IoT will require much more powerful and extensive IT resources than are typically available in the user environment. Consequently, outside data centers and cloud-based computing services will become essential for a functional IoT.

“The real-time computing required in IoT applications may demand the type of high-density computing that in the past was only used by PhDs in labs working on something like genome modeling,” Battish says. “But the capacity for that supercomputing power that was reserved for researchers is now becoming more available, thanks to the emergence of the cloud and rise of modular data centers. One of the big challenges posed by the IoT is how to perform computations on the data and spit it back in real time. That’s where data centers come into play.”

Still, sites deploying IoT sensors will need IT infrastructures capable of handling an increased load. More extensive wired and wireless networks will have to be built out to shuttle data as seamlessly as possible. On-site data storage resources will need to be beefed up to supplement storage accessed via the cloud. And, in addition to more IT hardware, enhanced software capable of performing higher-end data analysis will have to be deployed.

Vetting suppliers

Building out the electrical infrastructure needed to adequately support a robust IoT environment requires a thorough vetting of equipment suppliers, says Jeff Wolf, a principal and project engineer at FBA Engineering, an electrical engineering firm in Costa Mesa, Calif. Suppliers of electrical products capable of being sensored to advance overall facility system performance, via measures like energy consumption, maintenance scheduling system reliability, or early trouble, failure, or tampering indication, are moving to adopt more flexible solutions for customers, but far too slowly, in Wolf’s opinion.

The problem, he says, is that too much building infrastructure equipment still comes with proprietary software and communications protocols. That locks customers into a single solution and makes it difficult or impossible for users to integrate it with other key software-based platforms that may be used internally.

“A few of the more enlightened manufacturers have moved to IoT-compatible, open-source, non-proprietary communications and software, bundled as part of their equipment,” says Wolf. “The software tends to include integrated functioning with other similar open-source products, and the suppliers also may provide IoT-based remote technical staffing support services, monitoring, and troubleshooting.”

The development of a standard communications protocol will be key to building out the IoT, Wolf adds. There have been strong advances in designing gear and systems capable of being monitored and managed remotely, but there’s still a long ways to go to lay the groundwork that will allow the IoT to flourish.

“Many of the facility infrastructure products in operation today may have USB ports that can talk to the laptops or tablets that are used in walk-around maintenance, but they don’t have strong connections to a networked system,” Wolf says. “The ability to centralize monitoring and have equipment that is sensored and intelligent will offer a big advantage and greatly increase efficiency.”

But this new brave new world of constantly monitored things — likely untold billions of them — will of course require energy. Not only lots of it, to power the increased data collection and computing demands, but also of a quality that is fully reliable. In any extensively sensored space, the need for adequate and secure power will be paramount because an uninterrupted, secure flow of data is the cornerstone of the IoT value proposition.

The fashioning of appropriate solutions for power protection and maximum up-time, including UPS units, and reliable cooling solutions for hard-working computer hardware, will fall to electrical system designers and contractors. While their work in the emerging IoT space will be complemented by others with specialized knowledge, there are many scenarios in which the electrical infrastructure and those who deliver it will be challenged in new and different ways. And that’s to be expected, perhaps, in the service of rolling out an initiative with the brazen ambition of connecting, well, everything.

“Tomorrow, the electrical contractor and engineer community that’s been focused on switchgear will see their attention shift more to the whole ecosystem and how it’s maintained and conditioned properly,” Devineni says. “Their domain is changing from installing and energizing a system to issues of ongoing maintenance and ensuring performance on a real-time basis.”     

SIDEBAR #1: Hottest Market Sectors for Connected Things

As new applications are hatched, the IoT sprints ahead.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is potentially as big and all-encompassing as the almost absurdly extreme open-endedness of the name suggests. But while there might be no theoretical limit to what can be digitally sensored and gathered up into the IoT, activity is now concentrated in a few sectors.

From an industry perspective, Gartner, Inc., sees manufacturing, utilities, and transportation — in that order — as the current nexus of activity for deployment of sensored stuff. In those applications, more than 700-million things — 736 million to be exact — are connected this year, if Gartner’s forecast from November 2014 is accurate.

But that’s still a fraction of the total number of things that are likely connected currently and part of the IoT. Gartner estimates that by year end there will some 5 billion things generating data.

But leadership in IoT applications is likely to change over the course of the next five years. By 2020, Gartner predicts, the most connected devices will exist in the utilities space. Manufacturing will slip to second place, and government will snatch the number three spot from the transportation sector. By that time, 1.7 billion things in those three areas will be generating real-time information.

Utility applications will soar, Gartner says, as the value of smart metering to better predict and control energy usage is recognized. Applications in the government space will surge as more municipal lighting is monitored to improve energy efficiency. Likewise, interest in the manufacturing sector will remain strong as more companies look for ever more ways to cut energy usage costs and improve processes.

In a press release laying out predictions, Gartner Vice President Steve Prentice suggested the IoT was unstoppable as the value of “smart things” that can “sense, interpret, communicate, and negotiate” is realized.

SIDEBAR #2: The Industrial Internet of Things

Given the World Wide Web’s transformative impact, it’s hardly a stretch to label the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) — a cousin of sorts to IoT — another potent revolutionary force. It has the potential to deliver broad and deep insights gained through closer study and analysis of the workings of the man-made elements that comprise the world’s productive infrastructure. The IIoT could rival or ultimately exceed the profound societal and cultural impact of the Industrial Revolution or other game-changing eras of the past.

Its specific potential in the productive goods and services arena distinguishes itself from those applications in the commercial buildings arena. And it’s the broadly defined IIoT where electrical engineers and contractors stand to have the most exposure to the push for expansion in digital sensing and connectivity.

The desire to manage physical assets and systems is hardly new. Generations of process and systems engineers have strived mightily to boost efficiency and productivity through closer monitoring and analysis of machines and the environments in which they operate. Improvements in hardware, software and other digital IT tools have greatly advanced that cause. But the multi-dimensional capabilities afforded by the IIoT infrastructure bring it to another level entirely. It’s one that brings fundamental change and improvement to the task of more intelligently managing industrial operations of all kinds.

“IIoT can be thought of in terms of layers,” says Udaya Devineni, senior vice president, U.S. services, for Schneider Electric, an Andover, Mass., company that is building up its IoT-support business. “At the bottom is the smart connection of assets, where you’re talking about sensors, controls, and instruments. On top of that is the smart operations piece, where you have product, quality, inventory management, all of the manufacturing things. One level above that is integration with the corporate systems that come into play.”

SIDEBAR #3: Internet Terms for Dummies

IoT, IoE, IIoT, Industry 4.0 — a confusing alphabet soup of sorts is cropping up around the edges of the universe of “connected” things.

The consensus term for this new world seems to have settled on “The Internet of Things (IoT).” But other descriptors have emerged, some of which actually reference separate components of this connected ecosystem. The distinctions may be minor, and for that matter, even irrelevant. But some rough definitions, culled from the Web and thus starkly unofficial, may be in order.

Internet of Everything: Often used interchangeably with the Internet of Things, IoE is perhaps more exhaustive, referencing the entire interconnected world that includes mobile devices that no longer constitute an unexplored frontier. Invoked to reference the seemingly unstoppable march to a fully connected world and the changes that implies, it may reference the whole mash-up of people, data, things, devices, and processes that are connected and networked.

Internet of Things: The IoT is a bit less inclusive, and is a more pointed reference to the emerging connectedness of things not designed as a communications device. These “things” can be any physical objects embedded with sensors, software, and electronic circuitry so they can transmit and receive data via some type of Internet-like communications protocol.

Industrial Internet of Things: Drill down to the specific applications of connectedness to the task of making stuff, and you start talking about the IIoT. Machinery, tools, equipment, and processes used to produce things in an industrial setting can increasingly be equipped with sensors. The end game is very specific: analyzing the data they generate to improve performance, and even taking remote control and monitoring to new frontiers.

Industrial Internet: Maybe indistinguishable from IIoT, it’s a term that players attempting to accelerate development of a connected manufacturing sector that may even cross individual company lines have adopted. A Web-sourced definition references a complex of “machine learning, machine-to-machine communication and Big Data”; “the integration of complex machinery with networked sensors and software” and an “Industrial Internet Consortium” founded by companies like AT&T, General Electric and IBM to encourage broad adoption of Industrial Internet technologies.

Industry 4.0: This is where things get dreamy, where an IoT is but one component of a smart manufacturing world where all the benefits of digital IT and real-time connectedness are utilized and fully realized to spawn another Industrial Revolution. Other elements of an Industry 4.0 world are simulation, robotics, data analytics, cloud computing, drones, cybersecurity, and even artificial intelligence.

About the Author

Tom Zind | Freelance Writer

Zind is a freelance writer based in Lee’s Summit, Mo. He can be reached at [email protected].

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