Much hype has been made around the “4th industrial revolution” or “Industry 4.0” and as of yet, much of it is yet to materialise out side of proof of concepts. There’s one simple reason, change. Humans don’t like change and finance departments aren’t keen on the cost in doing so.
Before we dive into how it’s going to affect you, first, we should probably look at what Industry 4.0 is. As you can probably tell, it is the 4th in a series of step changes to industrial processes, starting in 1780 with mechanisation, it has gone through mass production in 1870, computing in 1970 and into today with Industry 4.0.
IT has come along quite late in the industrial journey, however it has had a profound impact upon all our lives. However, with the proliferation of IT across our lives over the last 50 years, an increase in complexity of management of all of the IT services and platform has started to cause issues for businesses globally.
One of the largest causes of unplanned downtime is human error, these mistakes are rarely made due to incompetence, instead they are caused by a lack of time. This all stems from complexity, complexity consumes time like nothing else, luckily Industry 4.0 is here to help!
For IT departments Industry 4.0 is going to make a huge impact, the uptake in platforms that are leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence is a huge boon. What the manufacturers are trying to achieve to a move away from manual intervention to management by exception, the day to day tasks of tuning and optimising can be managed by artificial intelligence instead of by humans.
By embracing this new normal, customers can see huge operational benefits when compared to traditional systems, some platforms are touting a reduction as high as 80% in the operational effort that is required to support the platform. With these kinds of savings it changes the dynamic within an IT department and its view within the business altering the view of IT from an inhibitor to an enabler.
Ultima are here to help you on this journey, not only within IT but also across your business. As a business that has won awards for our use of AI and machine learning we are positioned to enable transformation across your business.
Written by Matthew Beale, Presale Architect ‑ Modern Datacentre
