“We had one industrial revolution, and it seems like we’re facing another industrial revolution today.” That’s the verdict of Amir Kupervas, the head of IoT strategy at real time analytics and data provider Anodot.

In an Internet of Things (IoT) enabled universe, the time will come where traditional business intelligence (BI) no longer cuts the mustard. Problems can be seen in real-time and be fixed – but the future is clearly around predictive maintenance, and detecting problems before they occur.

Anodot, a real time analytics and data provider which launched in 2014, is looking to do just that with its anomaly detection toolset, which combs through vast quantities of data and finds outliers all at rapid speed, providing businesses with greater insight without the usual time delays. For the Industrial Internet, as well as Anodot itself, Kupervas argues it is a major tipping point.

“I think the promise and potential is huge,” he explains. “Factories [and] the automotive industry [are] starting to link this vision of fully automated factories. The opportunity is huge…especially from our point of view where we look at data. We see a tremendous amount of data that is starting to be turned up, and it’s a huge opportunity for us.”

With one unnamed customer in the manufacturing industry, Anodot monitors their production line, machines, and jigs, having found traditional BI tools simply didn’t cut it.  On several occasions, downtime of the machine has been prevented through analysing the data Anodot provides. “In that case we saved the manufacturer a lot of time and money by not shutting down the machine,” says Kupervas.

Yet Kupervas readily admits the path is not entirely clear. Among the long list of issues he cites for his company and the industry in general include security, challenges over what data should be sent and collected, and – that old favourite – standardisation. Yet that is not all. “There is a big step that the industry itself needs to take in order to be at the point that it needs to be ready for industry 4.0, starting from the machines themselves collecting the data,” says Kupervas. “There are a lot of machines that are so called dumb machines which just do manufacturing, but not producing any data. The data will be collected, and we’re starting to see it being collected.”

The Industrial Internet is wide-ranging in the number of industries it looks set to infiltrate. Take printing and mail for instance – gaining real-time insight, extracting predictive analytics, and utilising predictive maintenance is key to improving the efficiency of the production mail industry, which is measured in fractions anyway. Kupervas sees this as key to the future. “I think the long term for not just actual 4.0 but any machine, the greatest advantage and benefit is the ability to reduce the downtime of the machine to a minimum,” he explains.

“Knowing that machine is going to have a problem, being able to prevent it before it occurs, or before the problem has become severe, is something that will definitely increase the productivity of every machine.

“When all of your machines are running on 100% productivity, it’s an ideal situation.”

David Drai, Co-Founder and CEO at Anodot will be speaking about predictive maintenance at the IoT Tech Expo Central Europe in the Connected Industry conference alongside DHL, Relayr, Koncranes, QiO and Machina Research at 3.20pm on the 13th June.

By James Bourne, Editor, TechForge