IT and OT convergence will be limited by differences in expectations and market views

For as long as I’ve been an analyst the markets for general purpose and industrial computing have been separated; back in the early 1980s IBM used to call the latter Non-Commercial Area Systems. The 2 areas require different technical expertise, as was demonstrated when HP even split out Agilent (its process-control arm) in 1999. Today perhaps the best way of looking at them is to think of Information and Operational Technology (IT and OT).

In recent years the ever-increasing power of microprocessors, improvements in wireless and other networking protocols and massive advances in memory and solid state disk capacities have inspired an number of innovators to create new products, loosely coupled together under the banner of Internet of Things (IoT). My Figure is a photograph of Google’s experimental self-driven car, but there are a huge number of other types of device being created mainly by manufacturing companies for deployment in Smart Cities, for health monitoring and other applications.

While I have many personal reservations about my own use of many of these new devices – I like driving and would prefer to keep my activities private – we appear to be running headlong into a world full of them.

My prediction however is that 2019 will be a time when the reality of the differences between IT and OT will slow their integration. In particular:

• Purchasing life cycles are very different, with IT components and systems being replaced far more rapidly than OT ones.
• The reliability of some OT equipment has to be much greater than for general purpose IT; transportation, medical and industrial equipment can kill people if they go wrong.
• There is a need to classify and filter monitored data from OT before it can be successfully included into IT management systems.

I’m not sticking my head in the sand here – just pointing out that the excitement many feel when new devices and process are first described will be limited by the years of hard work technologists will need to do to get them to work… and that we may be bored of some of them by the time they eventually arrive.

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