An uncomfortable truth of the digital industrial revolution is that it is often difficult to connect older factory equipment to the cloud. Despite the hype about automated factories, the reality of the shop floor is often more 1970s Detroit analog than 21st-century Dubai robots.
Indeed, cloud experts suggest that it is only worth worrying about connecting older hardware to the cloud if the machinery has the necessary port, suggesting that while androids may well dream of electric sheep, many robots will end up ostracized on the outside of the fourth industrial revolution.
So, how big is the problem? Production lines in many facilities around the world consist of machinery that can be decades old – and in very rare cases – up to 80 years old. The average age of industrial equipment in the United States is 10 years old according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and it is not uncommon to have equipment that was built in the 1980s still in use.
In fact, there is a booming trade in used industrial equipment in the United States. Obviously, equipment manufacturers in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s weren’t thinking about how their heavy iron could be networked to feed data into the cloud in the future. Yet factory owners now need expensive older hardware to co-exist with cloud-capable machinery
And factory equipment is expensive. A used Doosan Puma 400-lb. 2012 lathe with some slight foxing, an 82-inch max cutting length, desirable 18-inch chuck and 21 inches of raw cutting diameter costs $109,500. Prices like these mean factory hardware cannot just be ripped and replaced every five or so years like, say, feeble white-collar IT equipment with its plastic casings and “power-saving” modes.
“The challenge is if you’re running a factory, you can’t really set out to say, ‘I’m going to connect up every one of my machines,’ because each [machine] is a snowflake,” Dan Jamieson, chief operating officer of IoT platform player Particle, said in a phone conversation with Silverlinings.
In fact, unless you’re a billionaire Twitter troll who also happens to run an electric vehicle company, you’re unlikely to be building new factories replete with the latest tech. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, many business owners have been leery of investing in new equipment unless it guarantees a return on their investments.
The initial onset of COVID-19 in early 2020 nearly halted manufacturing install activity for at least six months, Alistair Fulton, the CEO of a stealth-mode IoT startup and a former vice president at Semtech, told us via LinkedIn. Things remained slow on the industrial IoT front for the first 12 months, Fulton said, with a rise in asset-tracking and monitoring systems coming about because of the tightness of global supply chains.
Are cloud adapters worth it?
Companies like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and SAP are putting out industrial cloud adapters for equipment that has a Serial or Ethernet port.
“If the legacy device has some kind of network interface [Serial, Ethernet or Bluetooth], then it won't be a huge effort to bring cloud connectivity to those devices,” Venkatesu Punugupati, principal IoT and cloud solutions architect at Fortive’s Industrial Scientific, told Silverlinings via a LinkedIn message. “If the legacy devices don't have any network interfaces suitable for adapters or gateways, then I wouldn't suggest putting more effort into bringing those devices to connect to the cloud.”
Most cloud IoT platform providers use the Open Platform Communications United Architecture (OPC UA) standard to support machine-to-machine links between legacy devices with suitable interfaces and the cloud, according to Punugupati. Companies can connect compliant devices to the internet through cloud-hosted gateways or adapters, he said
But for some time, support for existing devices must continue, Punugupati added. Indeed, condition monitoring of older machines should extend the lifespan of some elderly industrial devices into the next decade.
IDC noted last August that retrofitting industrial machinery is a cost-effective way to update outdated equipment. Updates can include cloud connectivity, as well as adding IoT and cellular links for older hardware – but only if that equipment has the necessary port to even get connected to the outside world.