The Industrial IoT Blog
IIoT Insights by Henry Costa
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Litmus at ProveIt! Conference 2026. Where Industrial AI Starts
Read more: Litmus at ProveIt! Conference 2026. Where Industrial AI StartsI sat through a Litmus session at the ProveIt! Conference in Dallas and I left with one thought in my head. Most AI in manufacturing conversations are backwards. People argue about models, copilots, vision, GenAI, and all that. Meanwhile, the…
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Ignition at ProveIt! Conference 2026. What Actually Scales
Read more: Ignition at ProveIt! Conference 2026. What Actually ScalesI watched an Ignition 8.3 presentation at the ProveIt! Conference in Dallas, and it was one of the cleaner “this is how you scale IIoT” demos I have seen in a while. Not because it had flashy dashboards. Not because…
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What I Took Away from ProveIt! 2026. A Reset in Expectations
Read more: What I Took Away from ProveIt! 2026. A Reset in ExpectationsI have been to a lot of manufacturing events over the years. Some are useful. Some are basically a sales funnel with better coffee. This one felt different. What I liked most is that the conference actually tried to prove…
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Why Your OEE Is Probably Wrong
Read more: Why Your OEE Is Probably WrongI’ve spent decades working with plant data, and if there’s one thing I wish more people understood, it’s this. Inconsistent machine data quietly ruins your OEE, often before you even know there’s a problem. I’ve seen this at small sites…
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Building Your IIoT Solution Portfolio: From Platform to Practice
Read more: Building Your IIoT Solution Portfolio: From Platform to PracticeIf you are building an IIoT portfolio as a consulting company, the challenge is very different from running IIoT inside a manufacturing enterprise. You are not optimizing a single environment. You are selling outcomes to many clients, across sites, industries,…
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Data Context in IIoT. Why Raw Numbers Aren’t Enough for Smarter Manufacturing
Read more: Data Context in IIoT. Why Raw Numbers Aren’t Enough for Smarter ManufacturingI’ve spent years deep in large IIoT programs. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of tags streaming from shop floors to cloud platforms across very different industries: automotive, pharma, high volume, and highly regulated. And there’s one lesson that keeps…
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My Expectations for the ProveIt! Conference 2026
Read more: My Expectations for the ProveIt! Conference 2026I’m heading to ProveIt! Conference in two weeks. February 16–20 in Dallas. It’s practically in my backyard. No flights. No hotels. Just me, my car, and five days of IIoT demos, vendor sessions, and hopefully some useful conversations with people…
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AI, IIoT, and the Knowledge Leaving the Shop Floor
Read more: AI, IIoT, and the Knowledge Leaving the Shop FloorLet’s talk about something nobody really wants to admit. Most plants are sitting on a ticking time bomb. Decades of operator know how are about to walk out the door as experienced people retire. The machines and systems might look…
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Building a Credible IIoT Business Case
Read more: Building a Credible IIoT Business CaseIf you’ve ever tried to pitch an Industrial IoT project to your CFO and felt like you were speaking a different language, you’re not alone. This situation comes up repeatedly in manufacturing organizations. The discussion often happens in small conference…
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Unified Namespace (UNS) as the Architectural Foundation for IIoT
Read more: Unified Namespace (UNS) as the Architectural Foundation for IIoTIf you want to talk about making factories smarter and more connected, you have to talk about Unified Namespace. I’ve been working with industrial data for more than 20 years, and I’ve seen many architectural patterns come and go in…
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From Shop Floor to Cloud: How Manufacturing Data Moves
Read more: From Shop Floor to Cloud: How Manufacturing Data MovesI’ve spent years watching data travel from shop floors to dashboards. And honestly, most people skip over the messy middle parts. On paper, the sensor-to-dashboard chain looks clean and simple. In real manufacturing environments, it rarely is. If you’ve ever…
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The Hidden Cost of Cloud-Native IIoT: What the Vendors Won’t Tell You
Read more: The Hidden Cost of Cloud-Native IIoT: What the Vendors Won’t Tell YouEveryone talks about cloud-native IIoT like it’s free money. Just lift your shop floor data to the cloud, connect a few APIs, and boom. Instant insights, zero infrastructure, pay as you go. I’ve been leading IIoT platform evaluations and architecting…