I think the reason these systems haven't been challenged yet is lack of knowledge. People tend to attack areas and industries that they know a lot about. This is why college hackathons have tons of dating, what to do, and delivery apps. It's their world.
If you don't have people coming out of the industrial automation space with a good understanding, it's hard to walk back in with a useful product.
That helps but you have to understand that most industrial and utilities sites hate new tech. They like proven tech that's been used in three other places before they adopt anything. And once they settle on something they want to stick with it for 15-30 years and have support for longer because everyone knows that it's going to take another 3 years to get approval for purchase of new components because the old stuff has been giving faulty readings the past year and a half which requires hard reboots, the firmware is no longer being upgraded and the guys who first used the stuff are starting to retire. Even then they just want something that fits into the same slot.
Sorry for the runon but this is a major gripe of mine. Most managers just want it to work and unless it doubles your profit, cuts failures and makes you coffee for when other stuff breaks and you're working overtime to fix it they don't want to change anything.
Well, naturally. Their job is not to use tech. It's to build something, or run something, etc.
I can sympathize, and I bet you can too. My dishwasher, my car, my garage door... I just want these things to do their job and let me get on with my actual work. I don't want the latest garage door or vacuum.
I find that kind of odd. Cooking is not a passion of mine, so i don't care about a fancy dishwasher, i agree i want something that just works. I'm not much of a gamer, but i completely understand friends who dump hundreds or thousands a year into hardware, because that is something they're passionate about.
If the whole point of the organization is to build things, it seems like they should use the best tools for building things. Now, there's a good argument for tried and true solutions, and if the new stuff isn't rock solid, you're going to have wasted materials. It really seems like they should be completely geeking out over better, shinier, fancier tools for building stuff.
Maybe the costs are so high, and the margins so thin there's no room at all for experimentation. But it can't be lack of desire. If it is indeed lack of desire, they're going to go out of business.
To expand on that, lack of awareness of the problem space and lack of knowledge of the specifics involved. And I think the latter is a huge barrier.
From what I've seen (relatively minimal), industrial automation tends to be incredibly bespoke. E.g. we had consultant X from Y integrator (sometimes now defunct) come in Z years ago (where Z is always > 10) and set up this system: we've been using it as a black box without change since.
In short the "Linux on the desktop" problem - the burden of having to support 1,000+ unique configurations, each with their own edge case behaviors (or outright bugs). And from what I've seen, the ideal startup growth pattern doesn't fit with a services "send one engineer out to an account to custom fix it" way of doing things.
"we had consultant X from Y integrator (sometimes now defunct) come in Z years ago (where Z is always > 10) and set up this system: we've been using it as a black box without change since"
This is accurate and it stems from the proprietary technologies that integrators must sew together. Want to build a better Siemens Step 7 IDE? Get a job at Siemens.
I think ultimately it stems from lack of source code ownership / use of open platforms / clearly defined interfaces.
Best case, with clearly documented and defined interfaces, you can rewrite or swap out an entire component. Worst case, you have no source, no standard technologies, and no interface barriers, in which case your choices are leave as-is (no additional features) or replace everything (impractical due to size of codebase / legacy functionality coverage).
> I think the reason these systems haven't been challenged yet is lack of knowledge
As a software engineer that works in this space, I disagree. The thing that keeps us using things like MODBUS and CAN are because the problems we are solving are themselves are very simple. So we tend to use simple solutions to address them. The latest dynamic languages and protocols (XML, JSON, YAML, etc) don't solve our existing problems any better.
Quite frankly, the extreme level of complexity in deploying something like Android to control a basic IoT device is beyond appalling. 640k may not be enough for everyone, but it is more than plenty to control IoT devices.
Exactly. Industrial automation also isn't sexy and manufacturing margins are small so the big dogs in the industry have limited R&D resources.
The upside is a lack of competition and a B2B environment. No need for a marketing department when you just have to attend a few industry trade shows a year.
Be careful with "lack of competition". You are ALWAYS competing with the incumbent solution. No matter how clumsy or awkward it seems; no matter how much better it could be; those solutions have amazing staying power and your niche can become your enemy because there's a limit universe of customers to sell the solution to.
> I think the reason these systems haven't been challenged yet is lack of knowledge.
As a software engineer, I always thought that the best way to have a great business (not a blow out VC style business, but a good business) is to be a decent-to-good software developer and have deep domain knowledge of some other industry. I thought the best way to get that would be to apprentice in that industry, but the opportunity cost is high (esp as you get older), so the second best way may be to take a job as a dev in that industry and learn as much as you can from the domain experts.
The combo of software development + domain expertise means you see problems to automate away all around you and you can actually execute on what you see.
Agree and also Investors have a bias towards the student crowd as they are much easier to impress and deal with, than an experienced Academic or Engineer.
If you don't have people coming out of the industrial automation space with a good understanding, it's hard to walk back in with a useful product.