The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is revolutionizing manufacturing and demanding greater productivity. As companies compete to get their products to market faster and cheaper, they need simple solutions to enable agility in their operations – all at the snap of a finger. Since there’s no time or budget for special tools or expensive, highly-trained engineers and electricians, machine builders need products that are easy to use, install and maintain. As you may have read in this past blog post about the Smart Factory of The Future, this need is driving a trend in industrial automation called “plug-and-produce.” 

2017 is expected to be an improved year for oil and gas. Reports show the industry is expanding, jobs are growing and drilling permits have doubled. This leads many to believe that over the next quarter, the market will rebound from several years of plummeting sales. Even with a rosy forecast, no industry is immune to challenges, and oil and gas is no exception. The oil and gas sector faces a unique array of pain points, from traditional concerns of safety and reliability, downtime and availability to dynamic new-age issues, such as regulatory and cyber security concerns. The key for overcoming these obstacles is having a sound and secure networking infrastructure.

As demand for mass transit increases in densely populated urban areas, so do passenger demands for more entertainment, on-time delivery and safety. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and impending technologies like Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) are making this possible. TSN is a novel technology, currently in development at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), that offers an entirely new level of determinism in standard IEEE 802.1 and IEEE 802.3 Ethernet networks. Standardizing Ethernet networks with TSN will deliver an important capability: deterministic, time-critical packet delivery.

In my 40 years working in industry and industrial automation, I cannot recall a period in which there has been so much technological jargon. Almost every periodical, advertisement, blog, article, paper, conference or website is loaded with references to the Internet of Things (IoT), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Industrie 4.0, Cloud Computing, Fog Computing, Edge Computing, Big Data Analytics and/or Small Data Analytics.

Are you new to industrial Wi-Fi and worried about perceived reliability issues? Many companies worry wireless local area networks (WLANs) are unreliable or only available for (or useful with) new equipment and state-of-the-art applications. Wireless technologies are no longer a luxury or bonus. They’re mandatory for modern industrial networking. As the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) drives changes on the factory floor, wireless infrastructure is the central nervous system that keeps everything functioning.