Entelec

Houston, TX 2022

Last week was my first week attending Entelec in Houston, TX.

There were great panel discussions including the LoRa Alliance and many great conversations on the floor as well.

Here are some of my favorite takeaways:

• LoRa devices are a great way to save on your monthly cellular bill. By creating long range wireless networks generating data off assets in the field you are able to save in monthly charges by aggregating at the edge instead of pushing everything to the cloud. Remember that first time you got your smartphone bill and the data overages? Now imagine thousands of assets in the field and you could be in for a surprise.

• Oil & Gas industry historically prefers CapEx over SaaS models & can be a challenge for adoption rates. The up and down nature of their revenue streams make it difficult for recurring commitments. Successful solution providers in this space must find a way to cost effectively compute on the edge, transport via cellular to/from the cloud, and provide a sensible cost structure to their customer incorporating all three.

• Many solution providers are able to install wireless gateways and sensor networks. It is fairly easy starting from scratch with temperature/vibration or flow monitoring on remote assets. I was thoroughly impressed with the amount of new vendors I came across.

• Very few solution providers are able to address the problem of providing cost effective offerings for small to medium size businesses looking to acquire data from existing assets. Each potential client has different manufacturers of the PLC and other hardware communicating proprietary protocols like Ethernet/IP or Profinet. Too many companies are still relying on modbus and reconfiguring the customer’s PLC while writing customer code on their product to accommodate the solution. Combine this with the Controls Engineer talent shortage and these become costly and non-viable solutions.

In the future I am hoping to see technology and solution providers begin to focus on the data acquisition from existing assets and networks in the field. Creating a wireless sensor network and pushing that data into the cloud is the easy part. Don’t stop once you added AWS or Azure connectivity to your solution! Don’t rely on modbus and custom code! Oh and before you panic over having MQTT or OPC-UA connectivity to move that data around, make sure you have a solution for existing systems and architecture to grab data from your Rockwell Automation or Schneider Electric PLC from 20 years ago.