The Industrial IoT Blog
IIoT Insights by Henry Costa
Tag: Industrial IoT
The use of connected sensors, machines, and systems to collect and use industrial data. It improves visibility, performance, and decision-making across manufacturing operations.
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Software-Defined Automation (SDA) Is Coming. What It Means for Your IIoT Architecture
Read more: Software-Defined Automation (SDA) Is Coming. What It Means for Your IIoT ArchitectureSoftware-Defined Automation (SDA) is one of those terms that sounds like it was invented in a marketing meeting. But this time, there’s real substance behind it. And if you’re building or evolving an IIoT architecture today, you should pay attention.…
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Five Conversations That Changed How I Approach IIoT Projects
Read more: Five Conversations That Changed How I Approach IIoT ProjectsSome of the biggest changes in how I work didn’t come from reading a whitepaper or going to a conference. They came from conversations. Quick ones, sometimes. A comment over coffee, a pushback during a design review, a frustrated operator…
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Digital Transformation: The Human System Behind the Technology
Read more: Digital Transformation: The Human System Behind the TechnologyI have spent most of my career around what people usually call the “hard” side of manufacturing technology. Machines. Networks. Data pipelines. MES screens. OPC UA tags. MQTT topics. Historians. Systems that can be diagrammed, measured, and optimized. Yet the…
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AI-Ready Data. How UNS and Sparkplug B Set You Up for Manufacturing AI
Read more: AI-Ready Data. How UNS and Sparkplug B Set You Up for Manufacturing AII’ve noticed something funny about “manufacturing AI.” The AI part gets all the attention. The real success or failure usually happens much earlier, in the boring part. How you name data. Where you publish it. Whether anyone can trust it.…
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ProveIt! Conference 2026. Real ROI with Abelara, Tupinix, and Axilon
Read more: ProveIt! Conference 2026. Real ROI with Abelara, Tupinix, and AxilonAt ProveIt! Conference 2026, I sat through a session that felt more like a plant-floor working session than a tech pitch. It was framed as a live, fictionalized case study. The company was Cappy Hour Bottling. The names were fictional.…
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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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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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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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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…
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Understanding 5G for IIoT. Use Cases, Limits, and Reality
Read more: Understanding 5G for IIoT. Use Cases, Limits, and RealityIf you follow industrial digitalization, you have probably seen 5G mentioned everywhere. Vendor slides, conferences, strategy decks. Sometimes it sounds like the missing link for Industry 4.0. Other times, it sounds like expensive hype. The truth sits somewhere in the…
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Why Edge Data Contextualization Is Key for AI in Manufacturing
Read more: Why Edge Data Contextualization Is Key for AI in ManufacturingIf you’ve ever tried to get meaningful insights from a plant’s data, you know the struggle. You wire up a sensor, push the data to the cloud, and… good luck figuring out if “Tag_123” is a temperature, a pressure, or…
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Top 10 MQTT Brokers to Watch in 2026
Read more: Top 10 MQTT Brokers to Watch in 2026If you spend any time around Industrial IoT, MQTT shows up very quickly. It has become one of the foundational building blocks for IIoT architectures, especially when the goal is to move time-series data from machines to higher-level systems in…