IT meets the real world

Innovative companies are connecting non-IT devices to their networks … and getting results.

There’s a lot of talk going around about how the boundaries between IT and the rest of the business are beginning to get hazy. After all, information has become the lifeblood of the new digital economy. Every transaction, every relationship and every marketing initiative seems to depend on networked systems and software.

While business is becoming increasingly dependent on IT, IT has still remained largely a world unto itself. We write software, manage networks and buy servers. We may think in business terms more than we have in the past, but we still live in a world of megabits and megahertz.

A growing number of companies are thinking “outside the box” and bringing non-IT resources under the care and control of their IT management systems. Using innovative devices from companies like Netbotz and Opto22, they’re monitoring manufacturing processes, field equipment and office environments at the same consoles as they monitor their disk space and LAN traffic. And the results are very tangible.

HOW'S THE WATER?

Here’s a prime example. A medical-supply company I recently interviewed has to closely watch the quality of the water it uses in its production processes. That’s because the water’s purity, pH and other attributes are crucial. The company has a piece of industrial instrumentation that does this monitoring, but the results of that monitoring were previously only available in hard copy form from a printer directly attached to the device.

That created two problems. First, a technician had to periodically check the printer to make sure everything was kosher. That’s a fairly inefficient use of human resources. Second, and even more critically, no one was checking the water quality overnight. That meant technicians could find an unpleasant surprise waiting for them first thing in the morning—a surprise that could potentially cost them many hours of valuable production time.

The solution was to hook the monitoring device into the company’s enterprise management systems, which, in this case, was CA’s Unicenter TNG platform. The data from the device was fed into Unicenter just like any other system or network metric. If any metric exceeded or threatened to exceed a specified threshold, an alarm went off—just as it would for an overloaded switch port.

Instead of having to have someone check the water all through the night, the system can now alert a technician via the same paging mechanism that the IT team uses. The result: no more Monday morning surprises, and no more production line downtime.

A manager at a company who oversees cellphone towers around the world is doing something similar. In his case, he has to immediately detect if the lights on any of his towers go out. His company can be heavily fined by the Federal Aviation Administration if it fails to report an outage—and potentially be responsible for a plane crash. His solution? Install these gizmos on his towers and hook them up to the network management console. That way, his 24x7 network management team can do everyone a favor and make sure the tower lights are “up and running” at the same time as it’s babysitting the company’s servers and routers.

In fact, in addition to pulling data from industrial devices and sensing whether a light is on or not, these devices can detect virtually an unlimited range of conditions: temperature, electrical current, sound levels, motion and more. They can alert you when a vending machine is out of soda, or when your parking lot is full. They can also execute actions—such as turning a device on or off—remotely via the Web. Ultimately, the only limit to what these Web-enabled “bots” can do is your own ingenuity.

GETTING REAL

Actually, this is nothing new. Many of us remember laughing when we heard about the toaster that someone had hooked up to the Internet to demonstrate the power of ubiquitous connectivity. But the bottom-line savings and prudent risk reduction that the two companies I described above are enjoying are no joke. The online management of non-IT resources can solve a wide range of real-world business problems faced by companies in every industry and market segment.

You can’t wait for a factory floor supervisor or a line-of-business executive to come to you with a suggestion for how this technology can be applied to your company. They don’t know it can be done. You’re the one who has to reach out to your nontechnical peers and start the brainstorming process. Who knows? In some industries, like facilities management or equipment leasing, such online capabilities could even be used to deliver value-added services to your customers.

If you think you have a potential application for this type of robotic technology, drop me an e-mail (ll@exit109.com) and let me know about it. I’m especially interested in how IT and non-IT folks get together to formulate such a solution. The walls between these two groups are indeed coming down. We just have to swing our sledgehammers a little harder.

P.S. For a fun demo of how this stuff works, try visiting www.internetio.com.