IoT data will blow up traditional PLM databases

IoT is one of the recent popular buzzwords in business and consumer world. I’ve been touching it in few of my previous posts – 3 Things PLM can do with IoT tomorrow and PLM and IoT common trajectories . Things changed from 2009 when I first time touched PLM and Internet of Things. The opportunity to connect huge amount of devices to the internet looks like a reality we are going to face tomorrow. Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report for 2014 report put Internet of Things on the top of the curve indicating – Peak of Inflated Expectations.

So, what can we do about that? My attention was caught by Joe Barkai’s article – The Emergence of Application-Specific IoT. Read the article and draw your opinion. My favorite passage from the article was about “Content and IoT” – a tremendous value of content coming from connected devices.

The business potential is not in the conduit, or the “plumbing” of the IoT; it is in the content. However, the data streams of disparate devices cannot be simply connected. Nor can the portfolio of dissimilar applications communicating with these devices be simply daisy-chained as depicted by those futuristic scenarios. Data interoperability is critical to harvest the potential value of the IoT’s content and to enable new meaningful business models that utilize its data. That means not only compatible and interoperable data protocols, but also, more critically, data models and common semantics, so that disparate devices and services can be linked, aggregated and harmonized to form an IoT solution.

The last thing about linking, aggregating and harmonizing information coming from connected devices contains huge potential for design and product lifecycle management. We can certainly dream about how to bring all information into PLM applications. However, here is the thing… Will existing PLM data architecture is capable to handle such data scale? Remember my “Will PLM data reach yottabytes?” article.

I want to come back to my thoughts about future of data management and PLM. Existing data architectures were developed back 10-20 years ago. It looks like vendors will have to re-tool PLM platforms with new technologies and capabilities coming from a modern PLM data management landscape.

What is my conclusion? IoT is going to change the scale of data that modern product development and manufacturing companies are consuming. It is not about managing of documents or even bill of materials. The tremendous amount of data will be collected from connected devices and transformed into consumable information assets. I don’t think somebody can predict where this process can take us today. However, it is coming, for sure. It is an alarm for PLM architects, data scientists and IT managers in manufacturing companies. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg