Twenty-five years ago, companies would never trust their hardcore industrial processes to desktop PC hardware and operating systems, or trust them to an online bookseller, search engine startup or light bulb maker. However, business models change, and Amazon has been in the cloud-computing game for more than a decade.
Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) business (Figure 1). Its annual revenues hover at roughly $7 billion, which is far ahead of IT mainstays IBM and Oracle, and competes with second-place Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and now, GE’s related Predix offering.
A few years ago, control engineers would have found it unthinkable for a corporate IT analyst to check in on the performance of a valve or pressure transmitter—much less bypass the plant historian, DCS and control network. Today, this is just the kind of chasm-crossing enabled by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
Read the rest of this article from our sister publication Control Global.