Mr. Müller, is the Internet of Things still a vision in the industrial environment or is it already a reality?
Müller: The good news first! Yes, it already exists, this new market. At last! Countless applications are now proving not only the functionality but also the benefits of the IoT. Our customers are already operating new business models, and I'm not talking about predictive maintenance, but services with which they can increase the performance of machines and systems in real time and bill them 'as a service'.

You have been trying to convince your customers of the importance of IoT in industry since 2006. How open-minded are your business partners when it comes to this topic?
Müller: It ranges from complete ignorance to "when can I finally install it, we need it now!" -We try to pick up the 'still reluctant' with a trick: We give them a gateway and access to our cloud. Five minutes later, they start playing; one day later, the 'time to confidence' is reached.

What exactly prevents many of your potential customers from tackling the topic with commitment?
Müller: Ignorance, confusion, fear and the belief that everything is incredibly complicated! What's more, as long as the customer doesn't know their business case, even the best and cheapest technology is useless. That's why we offer 'soft skills' in our cloud application that everyone simply wants to have. Once they're there, the ideas come. One of these important elements in our solution is 'real time': the ComTom solution needs just milliseconds to query and analyze data around the world. This is crucial for many business cases that are currently emerging. For example, our largest application comprises 4 million clients, each with 160 data points, and the RTT is 150 ms!

You are now launching a starter kit at SPS IPC Drives at a fairly aggressive price. Why are you doing this?
Müller: We - and by that I mean our entire industry - have to eliminate the inhibition threshold among users. Many users believe that they have to spend huge sums of money before they can implement analytics. As I said, anyone who has tried it out and sees that they can analyze changes in the status of their systems from all over the world in just a few milliseconds will quickly understand that a new source of income is opening up.

Is the establishment of the IoT comparable with previous innovations in automation or does the topic also have its own special features?
Müller: No, the IoT in industry cannot be compared with anything that has gone before in automation: The advent of the open source idea is more massive than ever before! Topics such as 'crowd sourcing' and 'artificial intelligence' are also changing the way tasks are handled. I think we need to get used to the idea that the revolution that we are now actually experiencing is about much more than just praying up and down about batch size 1 in our industrial production! In the end, 'Industry 4.0' will look very different from what many people imagine today. And it will also prove its real benefits elsewhere. I think we have to think bigger: the whole environment of digitalization serves the goal of making our world a better place. How else are we going to industrialize a continent like Africa quickly enough or tackle climate change? - We should all prepare ourselves for much greater changes than are currently foreseeable!