CHAPTER 1 The Business Value of Using Real-Time and AI/ML-Powered Decisions for Industrial IoT Applications Across many industries—including manufacturing, oil and gas, utilities, telcos, media, and more— downtime is expensive. Operating costs can grow as staff and machinery sit idly by, and revenues may drop as services and products are not delivered. Traditional approaches of waiting for something to go wrong are incredibly bad for business, whereas getting in front of potential problems saves time and money and makes life easier for customers. It also opens up new business potential, such as offering capabilities as a service, rather than selling equipment to customers. As a result, companies today have a great need for real-time decisions and proactive, predictive maintenance. Other areas that can be impacted include overspending when operations are inefficient and losing out on a new opportunity by missing telltale signs of emerging customer demand or market opportunity. Rather than reacting after the fact, insight into the root causes of the problems that lead to downtime, defects, inefficiencies, or missed opportunities beforehand can potentially cut costs, accelerate time to market, grow revenues, and increase customer satisfaction. Increasingly, industries are using IoT devices to garner those insights, employing the devices to get information about every aspect of their operations. For example, a manufacturer might use sensors throughout an assembly line to predict when a machine will likely break down, or an oil and gas organization might use predictive analytics on data from sensors installed across a pipeline to help identify corrosion and damage. Organizations can leverage the data derived from billions of connected devices to drive never-before-seen efficiencies in internal operations and create entirely new value streams that transform their relationship with their markets. Data Explosion Industrial IoT brings together connected intelligent devices and analytics 500 in a way that allows organizations to monitor, collect, exchange, analyze, and deliver valuable new insights about their systems and processes. zettabytes These insights can help drive smarter, faster business decisions. But one problem most companies encounter is that IoT devices produce very large volumes of data. One industry report estimated that by the THE AMOUNT OF DATA end of 2019, IoT devices will generate more than 500 zettabytes per year GENERATED PER YEAR in data (a zettabyte is a billion terabytes). That number is expected to grow exponentially in the years that follow.1 BY IoT DEVICES1 1 https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/global-cloud-index-gci/white-paper-c11-738085.html Copyright (©) 2019 RTInsights Industrial IoT Data Collection & Analysis for Real-Time Decision-Making and Predictive Maintenance 3