Informally, Industrial Revolutions are referred to as Industry “Points O’s.” The First Industrial Revolution, or Industry 1.0, took place between 1760 and 1830, the second following up shortly after between 1870-1914. Between 1950-2002, the world underwent “digitalization” as a result of the Third Industrial Revolution, or Industry 3.0; and since 2011, we have been undergoing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, more commonly known as Industry 4.0. As a result of digitalization, data intelligence has been a primary driver in prospective industry revolutions.
As a result of Industry 1.0, machines and tools were able to replace animal and human labor. This was especially monumental for its time (1760-1830). How? The use of iron and steel for machinery began to skyrocket. As a result, working class citizens were able to create new resources, such as steam and internal combustion engines – which went on to drive a sector of the economy in itself.
Under Industry 2.0 (1870-1914), workers of the mass production industry saw many days of sunshine. For the first time, assembly line efficiency and productivity was lightened and shipping was made easier due to the invention of railways and telegraphs – another product of Industry 2.0. More along, new materials such as stainless steel and plastics were introduced as societal benefits.
Things got more technological under Industry 3.0 (1950-2002). The Third Industrial Revolution introduced electronics and IT, as well integrated them into manufacturing procedures. As a result, society saw a massive rise in telecommunications, computers, and even nuclear power. There was also a noteworthy widespread in factory automation, such as the incorporation of robots and PLCs to contribute to the general workflow.
Since 2011, interconnectivity has been the key focus. Already, Industry 4.0 is set to provide higher-level automation driven by artificial intelligence, as well as optimized manufacturing using real-time data and sensors. Additionally, this Industrial Revolution is focusing on a way to integrate cyber-physical systems throughout the supply chain.
In its outcome, Industry 4.0 will have used big data and machine learning to automate plants, warehouses, machines, and more. Furthermore, Industry 4.0 will have created smart machines that will be capable of collecting and analyzing data, as well as communicating the right information at the right time.
In other words, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will lay improvements across 3 new sectors: smart communication, data quality, and smart devices.
Smart communication allows manufacturers to rapidly respond to changing demand, inventory shortfalls, or equipment faults. Data Quality helps companies quickly locate problems so they can respond to them quicker. Additionally, data quality can be refined through organization-wide networks. Smart Devices create increasingly autonomous ecosystems that act as a catalyst for the future of the industry. Examples of these include driverless vehicles and drones. Driverless vehicles can navigate factories and warehouses, and drones can be used for maintenance and inventory management.
With that being said, business owners should seek insights on the ways they’re being impacted by Industry 4.0 In other words, this is a great time to prepare an effective data structure, focus on high-fidelity data creation and communication, standardardized business and data process, and understand your business’ use case. If even one important portion of the data is missing, it can break the digital thread – causing the flow of data to stop.
Is your data ready for Industry 4.0? Find out in the infographic below.
“If this truly is the Fourth Industrial Revolution it’ll be of the scale of the past three,” says legendary venture capitalist Duncan Davidson. “If we’re going to do this reindustrialization of America and prepare for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it’s going to be more AI, more robotics, taking a lot of things like 3D printing, additive manufacturing it’s sometimes called, and putting it in scale operation in this country. Tech has a real part to play in that but this will pervade the whole country.”
Duncan Davidson, General Partner at Bullpen Capital, says that the reindustrialization of America will be powered by tech but pervade the whole country in an interview on CNBC:
Preparing For The Reindustrialization Of America
Amazon might become a $2 trillion company. Digital ads, I think old media is really going to be in trouble here, Retail — if people can get by without the ads in the local newspaper and have the same sales why do they keep advertising? Remote collaboration — that’s an obvious category (to invest in). I think the two that are less obvious are first the gig economy, its thriving, people thought it was on its back legs. The final one is reindustrialization, what some people call the fourth Industrial Revolution, which is the next big thing coming out of this.
I think Marc Andreessen’s piece was terrific. You think about the tech sector, it’s probably more important now to the economy than the auto sector, which has been driving this place for 100 years. We don’t have a really strong voice at the table here. He’s exactly right. We shouldn’t just repair roads and fix bridges, we have to build the future. I think what he’s getting at fundamentally is if we’re going to do this reindustrialization of America and prepare for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it’s going to be more AI, more robotics, taking a lot of things like 3D printing, additive manufacturing it’s sometimes called, and putting it in scale operation in this country. Tech has a real part to play in that but this will pervade the whole country.
The VC Model Is The Core Driver Of Growth In This Economy
The VC model is the core driver of growth in this economy. If you go back and look at the stats it’s overwhelming. If you think about what we did in VC in the 80s it was PCs, it was hardware, it was disc drives. In the 90s it was software and the internet. More recently, it’s all kinds of things that is spread very broadly across the economy but basically is software-driven, There’s no problem with the VC industry rotating itself back toward industrial things and toward real things and away from software. In fact, it’s exactly the right industry to be agile and move very quickly to finance this next wave of innovation.
It’s just not here yet. But if this truly is the Fourth Industrial Revolution it’ll be of the scale of the past three. I think the boom in the venture world, let’s say from 2024 to 2032 or some time frame like that, will be bigger than we’ve seen in the last decade and probably rival what we saw in the 90s. What we see is an acceleration of current trends. So Zoom may be overvalued but the direction of remote collaboration tools, no question. Remote learning — universities may have a total change into more teaching online versus people going to the universities themselves. I can go down through the whole list. Look at what’s really surging and think of that as an acceleration that will continue.
We’ve been talking about 5G for a very long time and now the opportunity is really here, says Kathrin Buvac, President and CSO of Nokia Enterprise. “We’ve said for a number of years that 5G will enable the Industrial Revolution.” Buvac added. “It’s clear that 5G has to be a lot more than mobility services. When I talk with enterprise customers I really do believe that these productivity gains that are spoken about are real. Operational efficiencies, process automation, all the way to dark factory operations to full autonomy, that is really what’s coming.”
We’ve been talking about 5G for a very long time and now the opportunity is really here. We’ve said for a number of years that 5G will enable the Industrial Revolution. It’s clear that 5G has to be a lot more than mobility services. When I talk with enterprise customers I really do believe that these productivity gains that are spoken about are real. Operational efficiencies, process automation, all the way to dark factory operations to full autonomy, that is really what’s coming.
Before we go to the deep depths of 5g technology I think they’re really two things. One is the convergence of IT and OT technologies. Enterprises need to bring their enterprise IT services and the operations technology together. That is not so easily done. The other thing is digital. Think about Amazon and Netflix and what they’ve done transforming physical goods, books into eBooks, and DVDs into streaming. That will not be possible unfortunately with Industry 4.0, meaning we cannot digitize a crane or a truck in a mine. That’s just not possible.
Industrial Digital Twins Powered Via 5G
What we will do is create digital copies of the big machines or robots. That is what we call the digital twins. What that has to do with 5G technology is that it all starts in connecting these sensors, these machines, these robots, these devices, the co-workers in the factories, in the minds, and in the energy networks. That is where ultimately we will need 5G technology because of the big promise of lower latencies or higher bandwidth capacity, etc.
I think there are a few geographies that are leading the industrial automation. I would say from our standpoint it’s clearly the US. It is clearly Germany where car manufacturing and many manufacturing opportunities are coming. It’s Japan and it’s a few other geographies across the globe that are really leading the pack right now in terms of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that we have to look into.
The Industrial Opportunity is Striking
One thing that is striking me is the industrial opportunity. Over 15 million industrial sites will be deployed in the next decade. We have today 6.5 to 7 million base stations deployed in LTE worldwide. So it’s more than double the number of industrial sites that we somehow all together need to deploy to enable IoT. How are we going to do that?
There is the issue of spectrum availability. We have to be super creative, whether that is shared license, CBRS, 3.5, large scale carrier subleasing spectrum, and making money through that. It’s so critical and that also determines which country, which geography, which enterprise customer will go first. Industrial devices will just not be as quickly available as the smartphone’s which will be made available this year. There is still a lag.
5G Is a Complete Redefinition of the Network
5G is a complete redefinition of the network. We have all discussed AI, edge, and cloud. But we have to bridge now for a couple of years for enterprise customers as we take them to 5G. The question is really because enterprise customers want to leverage productivity gains now, not tomorrow, like yesterday. The question is really how do we do that? Can we potentially provide private wireless networks, with the help of our telco customers, to enterprises that can then just be a software upgrade to 5G? We would do this while we deploy industrial sites today based on LTE technology.
Enterprise customers are wired a little bit differently than us consumers. think about uplink video. We’re just so used to down-linking from tablets as consumers. We need a lot of uplink capacity if we use email or if we browse. If for a millisecond the network doesn’t work it bothers us, but it’s not the end of the world. But we need six nines reliability in the network in order to make sure we have the unmanned vehicles in the mines or the robots and the factories running precisely with that accuracy. A lot of work is needed still to get the 5G networks where they need to be, but it’s really exciting times to build that infrastructure.
The world of oil and gas in the Middle East, although very lucrative, still operates in a very traditional way. But that’s changing. The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) is the state-owned oil company of the United Arab Emirates and holds the seventh-largest proven reserves of oil in the world at 97.8 billion barrels.
ADNOC is embracing digitalization and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in a big way. They are calling it Oil & Gas 4.0.
ADNOC is a national oil and gas company that has been in business for more than 45 years. We have been a solid and reliable provider of oil in the market, of energy, of refined products, and of petrochemicals. We are also a company that fueled the growth of the UAE. We are so proud of our company that we thought maybe we need to go to the next step. We are looking forward in how we are going to develop ADNOC to meet the challenges of the new and future demands.
Global energy demand is growing and is fueled by a bigger middle class coming on the market with more consumers. To understand this and to become an oil company of the future we have to change. We have to embrace innovation. We have to embrace change. We have to embrace digitalization. We look at this as our way of fueling Future Industry 4.0, the future revolution. We call it Oil & Gas 4.0.
Digitalization Starts With Big Data
We see this as a methodology for us to be agile, to be flexible, and to impact and speed up the decision making process. In this day and age of information superhighways that are changing and social media everything gets impacted by everything. You hear people in the East impacted by people in the West. Where does an oil and gas company fit into this? Do we transform ourselves into just an energy company? Are we a product company?
Regardless of where we go and regardless of our smart growth strategy and how we want to be a reliable supplier, digitalization fits right in the center of this. Where does our digitalization start? Our digitalization starts with our big data. Everybody says it’s culture. Yes, but the foundation is big data.
The Foundation is Connectivity
The foundation is connectivity. We have 14 operating companies that are all connected. In reality, we are operating in one geographical location. On the ground we are connected through pipelines throughout our facilities. We share facilities and products. We supply and give to each other and we do a lot of work together. Yet, our decision making process was not compliant. It was silo-based because we are 14 operating companies. Upstream and downstream.
All of you know the difference in culture between upstream and downstream, between manufacturing and the cowboys of the upstream. They make so much money, and we need them definitely, but digitalization has always been a part of the downstream. Remember, we are the original IoT. We had sensors everywhere. We were operating the plants using sensors in a closed network. We were doing this for such a long time. Now, this has moved out.
Real-Time Data Screen Like the Star Trek Enterprise
What did we do in ADNOC? Based on our big data and our connectivity that was already there, a lot of subsurface activity in data, we collected all this in one location. We did this through a fiber optic network, through 4G wifi, and made this connection is a secure closed network. We brought all the data in real-time to ADNOC’s head office.
We put this screen (below) on one floor as a panorama. It was an exciting journey to build that place. It’s a 50-meter screen and beautiful. The place looks like the Enterprise on Star Trek and it will help ADNOC to go where no other company has gone before!
Real-Time 50-Meter Data Screen Like the Star Trek Enterprise
Oil & Gas 4.0
The way see it is data is there. We collaborate with people in the oil and gas industry but we are looking beyond that. The new technology of artificial intelligence, algorithm, and data analytics, are much more advanced in other industries such as social, marketing, sales, and everywhere else. Yet, we in oil and gas have always been very traditional. In the beginning of the 20th Century and beyond we were the innovators. We drilled where nobody could go. We led the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions. We were fueling it.
Now how do we fuel the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Oil & Gas 4.0? We do this by harnessing our big data and by putting together connectivity. But what’s more important I think is changing our culture. The culture that we have currently is still a very traditional culture. Our decision-making process takes a very long time. A company of the future needs to take decisions very fast. They have to be accurate. They have to de-risk their investment and understand how to de-risk it.
Oil & Gas Coping with Technology Moving at Warp Speed
Things are moving at light speed, at warp speed. We really have to cope with this. To do this we need the information readily available for our management, for our leadership, for our engineers. At the same time, we need to allow these decision processes to go fluidly into the business process. That means we have to reduce costs. We have to look up how we optimize. It’s not oil and gas at any cost. It’s oil and gas at a cost. The cost is very important in the future because that’s sustainability.
Digitalization will help reduce the environmental impact of our facility. At the initial stage, it’s measurement, monitoring, knowing what we are producing, knowing what we are wasting, and knowing how we impact our environment. How do we do it? We do it through measurement, through optimization, reducing our energy footprint, doing a lot more carbon capturing, and doing less with more. Digitalization helps with that.
Easy oil is over. Now we have to go with very difficult to extract oil and gas which are very unsafe. Some of our oil reservoirs have 25 percent H2S. It’s a very poisonous gas that can kill. How do we reduce the impact on the environment and the impact on the people? We do this by going into remote operations, by doing a lot more with robotics, drones, all the new technology that is used everywhere else. We need to start adapting it.
“Our customers, they’re betting their business on us,” says Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block. “They’re disrupting their business models. They’re reinventing themselves leveraging our technology. They want to know that we have a trust-based relationship. At the end of the day, it is all about trust.”
Block says that we are just at the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and that companies love to work with Salesforce because they represent the future.
Keith Block, co-CEO of Salesforce, discussed how companies are going through massive business model and digital transformations in this Fourth Industrial Revolution that is just getting started. He was interviewed by the legendary Jim Cramer on CNBC: (video below)
We Are Just at the Dawn of this Era
We’re playing for the long game here. We’re going to be celebrating our 20th anniversary coming up in just a month. When we think about what’s happened over the last 20 years, we’ve seen revolutionary changes in technology and we’re in this Fourth Industrial Revolution. In that Fourth Industrial Revolution, we have companies going through business model changes and digital transformations and the role of the CEO is different than it used to be.
This is where companies love to work with Salesforce because we represent the future. We’re all about the future. We’re about creating and innovating and co-creating around customer engagement. This is a long game this Fourth Industrial Revolution and we’re just at the dawn of this era. So this will be happening for a long time.
Disrupt or Be Disrupted
It’s all linked together. We live in a world with these technologies where it is disrupt or be disrupted. If the CEO of a company is not the Chief Transformation Officer they need to come up with a strategy, they need to make a move, they need to embrace these technologies. No industry is really immune from this level of disruption.
At the end of the day, everything begins and ends with the customer. It’s all about the 360-degree view of the customer. That has been the Holy Grail since I’ve been in the industry. Providing the insights, providing the level of engagement, the technology, around how customers can have a greater experience.
Our customers, they’re betting their business on us. They’re disrupting their business models. They’re reinventing themselves leveraging our technology. They want to know that we have a trust-based relationship. At the end of the day, it is all about trust.
Everything Rotates Around Trust.
We are a values-based company. Since the day the company was established we were a values-based company. We have four values and our number one value is trust. Then we have customer success and innovation and equality. Those are very very important to our stakeholders. The modern company is a stakeholder theory company.
It’s not just about Wall Street and earnings, which is obviously very important. We take our shareholders very seriously. It’s also about our customers. It’s about our partners. It’s about the community that we live in. Everything rotates around trust. We have a trust deficit. Some people call it a trust crisis in the world right.
If you have an employee, an employee wants to know that they have a leadership team that’s listening to them, that they have a voice, and that they trust the decisions the leadership is making. They want to trust that they’re responsible decisions that are consistent with the values of the company. With governments, we trust in our leaders. We want to trust in our leaders that they’re making great decisions for our citizens.
Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg says that 5G is much more than just your typical mobile network speed improvement. 5G is a transformative technology that will power the Fourth Industrial Revolution and dramatically change society in the process. Like the three Industrial Revolution’s before this one, the innovations that are enabled by 5G are what will define this technology advancement.
Last year Verizon launched the first 5G network with 5G Home. There is so much to come from 5G this year and the years to come. 5G will change everything. The pace of technology change that we have seen in the last decade has been fast. The only thing we know for sure is that the pace of change is going to be faster in the future. We are going to see technology changes that are going to transform people, businesses, and society.
We are facing multiple challenges on this earth, our daily work life, things around us, climate change, and we are heading into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Think about all of these challenges and the Fourth Industrial Revolution together with 5G. Together with all the new technology acronyms like VR, AR, AI, and more. All of that together is really what we are talking about when it comes to the technology change that is inevitable that we are going to see in the future.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution Will Be Built on 5G
For us here we are on the cloud. It’s really to see that we are using this change and shape it in a direction that is actually transforming and doing good. The next area of technology advancement is going to be built on 5G. Most importantly, this is a different industrial revolution. The first one was the steam engine. The second one was electricity and the third one was digitization. All of them have a general purpose technology as a base. Then you innovated tremendously on it.
The steam engine, of course, on steamboats connecting continents, trade resulting. Electricity changed everything. Then of course, with digitalization that brought out all the PC computers, the internet and all of that. These were enormous transformations. The general technology for the Fourth Industrial Revolution is actually the total connectivity that 5G can bring. That’s what I see as a huge opportunity for all of us and our society to use in the next era of technology transformation.
5G is a Quantum Leap Compared to 4G
So what is 5G? 5G is a promise of so much than just an increase in wireless technology. From the beginning we had the 1G, the 2G, the 3G, and then the 4G. They were sort of leaps of differences when it comes to speed and throughput. When we think about 5G we think about 10 gigabits per second for throughput. We think about 10x improvement in latency. We think about 1,000 times more data volume to the network. It’s just radically different. It’s a quantum leap compared to 4G.
We have already done some real type of examples. We had an Indianapolis 500 driver that had blacked out windows driving extremely fast with 5G. Latency was so low you could actually drive it.
https://youtu.be/Dw2GT95Vyxc
Those type of things require innovation. Innovation requires a lot of different people and constituencies working with us. When I think about technology I also think a lot about how that can do good for our society. We are entering an era of more challenging things around the world and technology is one of the most important things that can transform it and make it sustainable. At Verizon, we call that human ability. We coined that word because we think about the human in the middle of technology to do right.
The Eight Currencies of 5G
When I think about 5G one of the big differences when we started developing 5G it was thought about giving a new type of solution for industry and for society. Ultimately consumers will have it. The capabilities of earlier wireless technology usually have speed and throughput assets as a different capability. We have eight capabilities in 5G. I call them the eight currencies.
The Eight Currencies of 5G
With the eight currencies of 5G you can do a service on them, you can monetize on them, you can build on them. This is very different than any previous wireless technology. There’s the Peak Data Rate and Mobile Data Volume, but it’s also the Mobility. It’s also how many Connected Devices that you can have. It’s Energy Efficiency and Service Deployment. And then, of course, it’s Reliability and Latency. There are eight currencies that 5G can give to the user. Whether it’s a device, a person, or an industry, that depends on how we are going to innovate on that.
It’s important that we have already started on a journey. Verizon started years ago to start building a network because you need a lot of fiber and you need a lot of dense networks to build these eight currencies. You need real estate to do mobile edge compute. Not only that you need spectrum. In some cases you need millimeter wave spectrum that is giving you enormous throughput and bandwidth.
Peak Rate and Thoughput
What I’m excited about is what innovation can we do on this currency? Let’s talk about the currencies that we have here. The Peak Rate and the Throughput are extremely important when it comes to doing things with speed. The first thing that comes to mind is how quickly can you download a movie on 5G. Today on 4G it takes 3 to 4 minutes with a 90-minute movie. It’s going to take you 10 seconds when you have ultra-wideband. So that’s a use case, but that’s really to limit yourself with what you can do with it.
There’s so much more that you can do when you have that type of Speed and Throughput. It’s a quantum leap compared to what we have today. It’s about rethinking how you can use the increased speed and throughput when you talk about speed at 10 gigabits per second and throughput probably 1000 times more than today. I’m excited about those two currencies, but there are other currencies.
Mobility and Connected Devices
Two other currencies are Mobility and Connected Devices. Mobility or mobile connections, that’s how it’s actually measured in speed. In a 4G network today you can basically capture a radio signal up to 350 kilometers per hour. In 5G it’s roughly 500 kilometers per hour. Why does that matter? Think about high speed trains. Think about things that are going to move extremely fast in the future that are going to bring efficient transportation. With 5G you can captures that.
When it comes to IoT and Connected Devices, one of the limitations of wireless technology today is that you can roughly connect 100,000 devices per square kilometer with 4G. With 5G you can do 1 million. Suddenly you can have massive IoT in order to transform big cities, industry, or behaviours where we need to address challenges that we have today. These two currencies are also very different and address different business cases.
Service Deployment and Energy Efficiency
Let’s talk about two other currencies or capabilities, Service Deployment and Energy Efficiency. Service Deployment is a little hard to explain, but what it’s really about if flexible service deployment where you can match your software with specific customer needs. Think about if you want to do a virtual classroom with five different cities and you want them to have the same software. Today on the 4G network that would take me weeks or even months.
The promise of 5G is that can go down to minutes where we can spin the new service based on the software demands of the customer. These are enormous changes. We just need to think how can we innovate on that?
Now there is of course Energy Efficiency. Here the world is facing the challenges of climate change and our industry needs to think about all of the equipment we are using and that everything we are using is improving how much CO2 we are doing. There are a lot of things coming out but we just need to continue and we need to do that collectively.
5G is promising to reduce up to 90 percent of the power usage that we have with 4G. This is about making the Fourth Industrial Revolution a positive change. The first and second industrial revolutions produced a lot of CO2 emissions because they were the steam engines and electricity. Here we have a chance together to actually power and uniquely address those two as well.
Latency and Reliability
The last two currencies are Latency and Reliability. On the latency side today in the mobile networks we can get to 100 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds. In 5G we will go down to 10 milliseconds. Why is that important? Everything realtime, AR, VR, needs to come down to at least 20 milliseconds in order to avoid delays. There are so many other use cases you can do as well.
Latency and Reliability are very important in the network. It comes down to how we can innovate. It’s just so dramatic how much difference with what you can do things with 5G than with the previous technology cycles.
