Today, I have the pleasure to sit with Arun Santhebennur, Co-Founder and COO of an industrial IoT (IIoT) startup based in San Jose called PetaSense. Industrial IoT has really come to the forefront through efforts by General Electric (Predix), other large digital industrial companies, and a burgeoning cadre of entrepreneurs. Tons of data is created from manufacturing technologies that are currently not being captured, and old technology is not equipped with sensors that would allow manufacturers to understand what is actually happening with their equipment.

Petasense wants to build an experience for manufacturing similar to the FitBit for our health. By retro-fitting manufacturing equipment with sensors to measure vibration, we can capture data to analyze the health of the machines.

For every gas turbine, a $1M+ piece of equipment that is already instrumented, there are three or four hundred lower cost machines with rotating parts that aren't being tracked. With low-cost continuous monitoring technology, Petasense provides predictive maintenance to every machine with moving parts.

The biggest cost in manufacturing is not necessarily repairing broken machines, rather the lost output from unplanned downtime. Often times, problems with a machine running at 75% efficacy is undetected, which costs the company extra power and lost output. Hidden problems may even cause the machine to break more quickly.

If you are interested in the evolution of manufacturing, listen in.