The Intranet of Systems

The Next Step for the Machine Internet

A warehouse is a system.

A factory is a system.

A hospital is a system.

The Machine Internet is now ready to take its next step, toward the transformation of systems.

Vendors have been adding intelligence to machines for a decade. My car can now tell me when my tires need air. Many machines can tell their owners when they need preventive maintenance.

An Intranet of Systems would get all the software on these machines working together, the way orchestration software lets a company control its supply chain.

But to get there you need security and standards. You can’t let rogue code in or the system can be destroyed from without. You must have standards, or the machines won’t interoperate as you want.

This is a challenge to both the proprietary model and to open source.

 Security is proprietary by its nature. In this case you must have strict security between systems and people.

Open source is vital because without free, shared standards vendors won’t provide software support.

While small companies were capable of creating communication standards like Zigbee, these larger systems require cooperation among the biggest companies. The falling stock market has provided an incentive for outfits like Amazon, Google and Microsoft to pursue these opportunities.

A lack of sharing is why systems like voice control haven’t worked in the consumer space. Google grabbed an exclusive on my car. My home runs Alexa. My kids use iPhones. You can’t scale control until every machine is speaking the same language. We also need a shared vocabulary, and universal adoption, to get these benefits.

The Systems Intranet is a technology area where China starts out ahead. An autocratic system can enforce the conformity necessary to adopt a set standard.

What we need, now, is a company hungry enough to make this succeed, and willing to share to accomplish the greater goal.

A decade ago, this was what Facebook and Netflix did. They created open source repositories called Open Compute and Open Connect, which shared software and best practices for building the cheapest possible cloud and the lowest possible cost for streaming. Clouds are built entirely on open source Linux, with other open source standards on top of them. That’s what makes the numbers work. We need no argument on that lesson.

A market bottom is when discussions on what will become the next market top need to start.

A city’s traffic is a system.

A military campaign is a system.

Your body is a system.

Systems are everywhere. Lower the cost of managing them with software connecting the machines, which are already able to manage themselves. Add the next layer of management software. Make life easier, create value, lower costs, and the tech boom is back.