The Digital Operations Signals report aims to uncover fresh learnings about the successes and challenges in the varied approaches that industries adopt for IIoT solutions. The business outcomes that our customers are pursuing to unlock the next level of improvements in efficiency, agility, and sustainability in their physical operations, utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, digital twins, 5G, and more.

To distinguish their companies in today’s competitive landscape, manufacturers must aggressively adopt digital technologies to enable smart operations, products, and supply chains. These projects draw upon concepts and technologies such as digital transformation, Industry 4.0, IoT, IT/OT convergence, AI, digital real estate, and a digital-first culture. Read this paper to understand what is behind the following six key findings:

• Industrial IoT is becoming mainstream.

•  Companies are increasingly looking to BUY off-the-shelf solutions

•  There are good reasons to use each project approach: BUILD, BUY-AND-INTEGRATE, or BUY

• Large companies prefer to BUILD; electronics and machinery companies prefer to BUY-AND-INTEGRATE.

• Strong IoT vendor ecosystems speed up time-to-value

• Budget constraints have faded, while cybersecurity and knowledge gaps have become key pain points.

The report confirms that adoption of IIoT technology has crossed the chasm and will soon start to be adopted by the Pragmatists, Conservatives and Skeptics. It outlines three main strategies that companies take: 

• BUILD

• BUY-AND-INTEGRATE

• BUY

Fusion fits in the Buy category where the company buys the entire IIoT solution which is plug-and-play with existing infrastructure and requires little customization and integration to deliver time-series data into Azure. 

“We are observing a significant rise in the use of operational data in analytics related to Operational Efficiency, Asset Health, Safety and Sustainability. Fusion has reduced the time to ingest and deliver such data efficiently to data scientists and engineers from months to days. With providing native connectivity to OSI PI, AspenTech IP.21 and IIoT devices in the field, we provide coverage to nearly all such operational data ” Ajay Madwesh, Head of Commercial Operations, Uptake

With more companies choosing the Buy option, the time to create the business case has reduced by 50% (6 months to 3 months) and the time to amortize the investment is 12 months when compared to 24 months with a Build strategy. 

Some key lessons learned were to involve stakeholder early on (including senior management and IT/OT personnel), plan specifications well and define the business case early. 

Companies who chose a buy option for a few main reasons: 

• The use of tried-and-tested technology: Fusion has been installed at over 50 sites and has proven to ingest time-series data along with metadata and hierarchical data into MSFT Azure

• Predictability of the outcome in terms of cost, time and performance: Fusion has a predictable licensing model and is highly scalable across an enterprise with the ability to start small, install rapidly, and grow with your use cases. 

• Quick time to implement: Fusion takes less than 1 week to install within your Azure tenant or our tenant.

• Ease of use: By providing end-user capabilities such as trending time-series data, auto-generating KQL queries, providing standard queries with thorough documentation, and utilizing Azure components, users can quickly get up to speed to solve their use cases.

• Confidence in the future of technology: As a Top Tier Gold Partner of Microsoft, Fusion is highly involved in the future roadmap of Azure. For example, when Time Series Insights (TSI) was deprecated by Microsoft, Fusion released a new version with Azure Data Explorer (ADX) and existing customers easily migrated to the new version with a day’s worth of effort.

• Ease of integration with existing technology: Fusion has first-party connectors to a variety of historians such as OSISoft PI, AspenTech IP.21, Rockwell FactoryTalk, GeoSCADA and Ignition. 

• Level of Security Capabilities: Fusion has solved this at various large and medium-sized companies using a variety of techniques such as utilizing private endpoints, installing in the customer tenant, only allowing one-way communication between source and cloud, and aligning to Microsoft’s best practices regarding architecture for time-series data.

“We clearly see a trend that people prefer proven standardized solutions rather than building something from scratch. A number of IoT adopters we have seen start building from scratch achieved successful first results in just a few months, but then they realize that it takes an enormous effort to make the solution industrial strength. One issue is to ensure the system handles all major exceptions correctly. Another important consideration is that maintaining custom code can become very expensive compared to a purchased solution that that updates for free” Dr. Dave Shook, PhD, PEng., Chief Data Officer, Fusion Data Hub

Find a copy of the report: https://aka.ms/dosignals723