Ecosystems and Platforms

The ABB Ability to bring intelligence to industrial plants

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I continue to look at the world of IIoT solution platforms that are being offered to their customers which are digitally enabled, requiring connected devices to improve efficiency, productivity and increase profitability, all being provided through digital platform offerings

I’ve looked at Bosch and its IoT suite, Siemens and its Mindsphere, GE and its Predix platform, and Schneider Electrics with its Ecostruxure to begin to explore and understand their digital platform offering. I do need to revisit GE and its Predix platform with recent changes occurring inside the company.

I then wrote a summary of the fact that Industry is lagging but catching up in its choices of platform offering, taking three of these examples and how just within a few months this seems to be accelerating into a real race of the IIoT digital platforms to seize competitive advantage as well as I term it “taking the IIoT hill” to make sure customers align with them. A digital industrial application offering has increasingly become central to growth for many of the infrastructure providers.

This post is about ABB and their ABB Ability™ to offer a common platform across the industries they serve of a digital end-to-end set of solutions.

ABB has been investing in building their ‘digital operations’ to control, interrogate and modify the operational task in response to the external signals, mostly through distributed sensors. The aim is to transform clients activities more into software-driven activity, where the operational results in identifying trends and possible failure modes and equally, how they can transform the whole maintenance regime, to reduce downtime and anticipate potential failure.

ABB has a fairly powerful business case for being a trusted partner.

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Gaining speed, perspective, inspiration and agility the Schneider Electric way

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Schneider Electric’s platform

I just wish I had reviewed these guys a lot sooner. Schneider Electric has been on my radar for reviewing their platform for some time.

Schneider is in among the leaders in the digital transformation of Energy Management and Automation of homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure and a range of industries.

They hold a commanding position in Power Management in Medium and Low voltage, Secure power, in critical power and cooling, grid automation, industrial and building automation and controls and providing discrete automation process systems.

Schneider Electric has been constantly providing integrated efficiency solutions for many years, well before platforms became fashionable.

They are constantly seeking to combine energy, automation, and software. They have adopted a very open ecosystem approach collaborating with partners, integrators and the developer community to build an open platform to deliver real-time control and operational efficiency

Schneider Electric is not set up as a glamorous company, they provide the essentials; such as boxes, enclosures, protect relays, cabling, control, switchgear, metering, racks, breaker switches. The list goes on and on. They operate in 100 countries and set out to find the most efficient and agile ways to foster innovation.

I get the real impression they have taken innovation to the core of what they do and I often can’t say that for many companies I review – more’s the pity.

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Mapping our Innovation Future through Ecosystems and Platform Design

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Why do we need a new innovative architecture, for mapping out the future

We are witnessing a very radical change, driven by technology, increasingly disrupting and breaking down the past traditional boundaries and market positions of many incumbent organizations. Mostly these were built so as to defend positions to achieve and maintain economic scale.

There is a new economic logic to building even greater scale through technology design, it involves greater complexity, yet its value proposition is to strive toward offering greater customer experience and satisfaction.

The solutions are valued far higher, in social and economic value. We need to recognize this is a new business model design with the arrival of engagement platforms that connect all the ecosystem of partners in its design, to gain this scale and value.

A new economic logic that gets closer to the connected customer expectations and daily needs for innovative solutions to solve, in ways far better than what are being presently being offered. Connecting technology, digital and human understanding brings radically different solutions.

A different innovative design has become paramount to these new offerings, so they can be capitalized upon, releasing this increased value creation understanding of opportunities.

The market dynamics are also changing; we are seeing greater disruption and blurring of traditional boundaries of competition, yet the reality is that innovation systems, structures and processes are badly lagging, in design and approach, to react and respond to this new dynamic.

A dynamic where the startup can undermind the established incumbent, mostly large organizations that are less nimble and agile, in radically different and dramatic ways, in short time frames, from the pilot, and testing to scaling those solutions, moving them from local to global through the power of technology applications.

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The Emerging World of Connected Industrial Ecosystems

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Whenever I seem to read about Platforms and Ecosystems, it mostly seems to relate to technology-led organizations and how they continue to connect us all up in our private lives.

As leading examples of the disruption that occurs and the connected value, we get offered the likes of Uber, Facebook, Apple, etc., all bringing new value to transform our world.

Yet, for me, the area that is shifting dramatically is where Industrial organizations are providing platform solutions to solve industrial problems. Good examples are Bosch, Siemens, GE and Schneider Electrics.

They transform their solutions and clients businesses by offering digital on top of the existing products in some awe-inspiring ways. They focus on connecting up their solutions into their client network on platforms to build the industrial internet.

The building of these platforms has prioritised specific industries to master and progressively transform their business into a digitally connected one. This seems to me to be so much harder than those like Facebook, Google or Uber.

Industrial solutions have had to deal with legacy “big time,” overcome entrenched positions or views and begin to collaborate in highly sophisticated ways, with often very demanding and sometimes sceptical clients.

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There is a growing force in Siemens MindSphere as it scales up in 2018.

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The move towards open-cloud based IoT operating systems has been significant in the past few years or so. Most major industrial companies have set about building and offering to their clients their platforms, for more open design and engineering, automation and operational work, as well as increased emphasis on maintenance and utilization.

To power this, digitalization has changed everything. The smart factory, plant, and buildings, work alongside smart products and solutions and smart business services are all in the sights of those industrial digital platform providers. The platforms-as-a-service has become essential to many industrial organizations to exploit.

I have been following a number of these in recent years and recently began to have a more specific focus on three; GE & their Predix, Bosch through their BSI and more recently Siemens and their Mindsphere. Others beginning to appear on my radar of industrial platform providers are Dassault Systèmes, Honeywell Connected Plant, Rockwell Automation and Schneider Electrics

Getting to understand Siemens MindSphere.

I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to be invited to the Siemens Innovation Day. I really appreciated it  The day before the main event I was included in the Industry Analysts visit to the Siemens Technology Center. We were provided a variety of insights in different presentations and demonstrations of the technology they are working upon. Mindsphere was consistent in its presence but was not as specifically focused on as I would have liked.

I put some of my thoughts down on a post “Creating the Industrial Ecosystem” about my take aways from this Siemens invite recently. I have been attempting to unravel my thinking between that that greatly impressed and the parts that still seemed to have innovation gaps to fill. MindSphere had a particular focus for me.

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Innovation Platforms: the future way to go.

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platform-buildingWe need to shift our innovation thinking, it needs to be digitally transformed. We need to accelerate our activity and engagement and to achieve this, we need to widen out our communities and connect differently.

This is where platforms come in, “they offer new business models that allow multiple sides (producers and consumers) to interact…..by providing an infrastructure that connects them” (source: Platformed.Info by Sangeet Paul Choudary)

The more I read, discuss and research platforms, the clearer the future becomes for innovation to really advance and achieve its potential, one so often spoken about yet so disappointing in most of its results to date. Innovation calls for the need of a radical change. Technology and its growing potential can make the changes to dramatically alter this.

Actually, technology is transforming the very nature of the firm.

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Managing digital knowledge adds value and growth through forming connections

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fitting-it-all-togetherDigital technology is about to become the precursor for all the changes we have put off for years within our organizations.

We need to radically improve our abilities to engage, relate and discover new innovation opportunities at a completely different level of faster and more meaningful performance.

It is through new forms of collaborations that will allow us to connect, by combining the concepts of ecosystems, platforms and seamless customer experience through digital technology, that is allowing this to happen.

Technology is presently moving way ahead of the systems that our organizations have presently in place, many are failing to extract the value and insights that others are beginning to clearly see and capitalize on, through the connection of technologies and market insights.Many lack the ability to connect and gain valuable insights.

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Innovating like it’s 1999

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1999-partyTo borrow a phrase from the musician formerly known as Prince, we are innovating, at least in regards to platforms and ecosystems, like it’s 1999.  This isn’t to suggest innovation is making beautiful music, but to take you back to a specific point in time and think about the conditions.

In the late, late 1990s and very early 2000s, many individuals and corporations were experimenting with ecommerce, learning what the “web” would do to and for commerce.

Thousands of startups obtained billions of dollars in venture capital money to exploit the new idea of e-commerce.  We were assured that this would be the end of brick and mortar stores.  Every industry would be disrupted by the web.  Pet owners would go to Pets.com, famous for its sock puppet mascots.  The CEO of Accenture would leave his post to become CEO of Webvan, which would revolutionize grocery shopping and delivery.  And so on.

Mostly what happened in that period was a vast blooming of a number of experiments on the web, which led to the “dot com” crash only a few years later and drove many of these startups and some larger, established companies out of business. Most of these crashes happened because no one had figured out how all of this new ecommerce stuff was supposed to work, or because of vague promises of the ability to monetize eyeballs.

New technologies or capabilities will always create a “land rush” of companies, new and established, who seek to stake their claims. 

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The Building Blocks for Managing within an Ecosystem Design

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building-blocks-for-ecosystems-2Today business organizations are in need to put in place the building blocks for managing ecosystem designs.

These building blocks are offering the potential of new pathways to a greater ‘connected’ innovation, expected today, one that gives increased value to the consumer.

Yet the understanding of what this means in commitment and structuring has some clear implications behind this.

Managing ecosystem arrangements I feel requires a far greater understanding of the potential design, so you can achieve a more robust, open, dynamic and highly collaborative environment.

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Understanding the Customer Journey is the key to innovating in an ecosystem

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evolving-innovation-a-new-formPaul and I have been exploring the interrelationships between innovation, ecosystems and platforms for a few weeks now.

Hopefully we’ve made the point that innovators must expand their horizons, because increasingly customers don’t want or need stand alone, discrete products as much as they want integrated, seamless, holistic solutions.

In fact I think we can easily predict that moderately interesting new innovations that integrate with existing ecosystems and platforms dominate disruptive new products that ignore ecosystems and platforms.

Why?  Customers don’t want to give up all that they have invested in the totality of their use of a solution or the experience when using the solution.  Even if the disruptive product or service delivers outsized benefits, if it causes the rest of the customers’ experience to suffer or degrade, many will choose to remain on a more integrated solution.

There’s a lot here to unpack.

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