Experts believe Industry 4.0 will drive a century of advancements over five years

2020/09/25 Innoverview Read

The majority of IT experts believe a century’s worth of technological advancements will happen over the next five years.

Four in five (82%) senior IT decision-makers (ITDMs) worldwide make the prediction as part of Industry 4.0 research conducted by Quadrant Strategies.

Industry 4.0 is the idea that we’re entering the fourth industrial revolution—driven by technologies such as large-scale M2M communications, the IoT, and AI.

The vast majority (87%) of ITDMs are in some agreement that Industry 4.0 will drive interconnectedness between people and businesses more than anything else in world history.

However, there is less agreement over whether Industry 4.0 will have a “significant impact” on business and/or society—with just over half of experts believing such in each case:

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Considering the overall bullishness for Industry 4.0 among the ITDMs, it’s surprising to see a relatively low percentage believing it will have a significant impact on business and/or society. This perhaps suggests that the general idea of Industry 4.0 is overhyped and there are more grounded expectations when people are asked to consider specific areas of impact.

Claudio Scola, Head of Product Management in the EMEA at Lumen, disagrees:

“There are examples of new technologies such as 5G and IoT that have generated a lot of hype, but I don’t think the overall potential of the 4th Industrial Revolution is overhyped.

The digital technology disruption we’ve seen over the last decade has proven that it’s critical for enterprises to embrace this new industrial age. Organisations need to effectively acquire data, analyse it, and act on it quickly. Any digital business must build these three competencies to accelerate their innovation and gain a sustainable competitive advantage in this new era.

We are seeing real-world advances with technologies that are enabling autonomous robotics, cloud computing, analytics, additive manufacturing, and augmented reality. These types of applications are starting to transform how consumers buy products, how we advance medicine, how we manage our cities and transport, and how we target and deliver a differentiated experience to customers.

Right now, the leading tech companies and hyperscale cloud providers are creating a lot of this technology. But, as with all industrial revolutions, standardisation is critical. The 1st Industrial Revolution was about standardising weights and measures. Now, the 4th Industrial Revolution is all about standardising APIs, protocols, operating systems, and data models.”

Another surprise was the degree of support for the statement that Industry 4.0 will be “the most substantial advancement in interconnectedness” in world history—especially considering the internet is often cited as the world’s most substantial advancement in interconnectedness and makes Industry 4.0 even possible.

“The 4th Industrial Revolution consists of all the technology pillars required around the digitalisation of an organisation. It will transform the way we all live and work,” comments Scola.

91 percent of global ITDMs believe that the ability of a business to collect, analyse, and act on data will determine whether their business will be a leader in the future.

However, almost three in four (71%) decision-makers are sceptical about whether current infrastructures can support coming increases in users, data volumes, and application performance requirements.

(Source: IoT News https://iottechnews.com/news/2020/sep/25/experts-industry-4-drive-century-advancements-five-years/ )