1) I assume you're referring to "Splunk for factories". You could make the same claim about plain-old Splunk. One business case is better real-time response to failure and later, better forensics. I agree, there are many factories where the process is perfected and the operators can read the tea leaves when something goes wrong. Another business case, and probably a better one, might be report generation for managers - people hate making the same reports over and over again.
2) Industrial software largely sucks now. But software in general sucked 20 years ago, and has improved much since then. True industry is behind the software curve by 10-20 years, so they are using old, bad (by today's standards) software. The thing is we've already improved that old, bad software - they just haven't adopted it yet. Once industry begins adopting "newer" software (think Java, .NET, web services) and they see the falling development costs and better features, they get behind it.
There is also a talent shortage in industrial software, because there are higher wages and better working conditions in the desktop, web, and mobile industries. However what has happened is we are now in diminishing returns in those latter three industries because they are saturated with talent, while all the cool things we've built to service those industries can now be repurposed by hard tech. It's the reverse of what happened after the Cold War ended and defense industry veterans fled for greener pastures in Silicon Valley.
1) I assume you're referring to "Splunk for factories". You could make the same claim about plain-old Splunk. One business case is better real-time response to failure and later, better forensics. I agree, there are many factories where the process is perfected and the operators can read the tea leaves when something goes wrong. Another business case, and probably a better one, might be report generation for managers - people hate making the same reports over and over again.
2) Industrial software largely sucks now. But software in general sucked 20 years ago, and has improved much since then. True industry is behind the software curve by 10-20 years, so they are using old, bad (by today's standards) software. The thing is we've already improved that old, bad software - they just haven't adopted it yet. Once industry begins adopting "newer" software (think Java, .NET, web services) and they see the falling development costs and better features, they get behind it.
There is also a talent shortage in industrial software, because there are higher wages and better working conditions in the desktop, web, and mobile industries. However what has happened is we are now in diminishing returns in those latter three industries because they are saturated with talent, while all the cool things we've built to service those industries can now be repurposed by hard tech. It's the reverse of what happened after the Cold War ended and defense industry veterans fled for greener pastures in Silicon Valley.