Consumer versus Industrial IoT

The value of sensor-embedded connected devices took a giant leap with the ubiquity of smartphones. Hand-held mobile phones morphed from being just a data and voice communication device to a versatile commodity that assists in navigation, news, weather, health, and so on. The iPhone itself boasts of a number of sensors for proximity, motion/accelerometer, ambient light, moisture, a gyroscope, a compass, and so forth. Apple watch, Fitbit, Amazon Echo, and so on have heralded a whole new era of smart, personal wearables, along with ingestible and home controls, thus opening up entirely new market segments. These home and personal devices together are most commonly understood as the Internet of Things.

However, these same principles when applied at scale—in enterprises and industries—multiply both in terms of complexity and benefits. The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) was established in March 2014 with the mission to accelerate the industrial adoption of IoT, by creating standards to "connect objects, sensors and large computing systems." This formally delineated IIoT from consumer IoT, the latter being more focused on personal and home automation gadgets and appliances, and dealing with different security postures when compared to IIoT.

In this book, the term IIoT refers to scalable internet of things architectures that are applicable to enterprises across a wide variety of industry verticals, such as energy, water, farming, oil and gas, transportation, smart cities, healthcare, building automation and so on, and will be referred to by its short form, IIoT.

In many contexts, the use of the term IIoT is limited to being a connectivity enabler, just like the internet enabled the connection of computers. However, we look at IIoT as more than connectivity. It encompasses the entire industrial value chain, which involves embedded intelligence, network connectivity, harnessing big data, machine learning/AI, the smart supply chain, and advanced analytics-driven business insights.