IIoT market in the Russian Federation: growth or impasse?

At the beginning of 2024, experts concluded that at the end of 2023, the IIoT market (Industrial Internet of Things) rose by 5% compared to 2022, to 144.4 billion rubles, and generally agreed that this year it is waiting for growth. However, the obstacles to its development have not gone anywhere. Solutions to which plan can eliminate problems, and which Russian developers have a chance not to curtail their activities?

No software, no hardware

The main barrier to growth, according to market participants, is the almost complete absence of domestic "heavy" infrastructure technologies. This is both the impossibility of own production of chips that meet the requirements of the market (for example, [1]LPWA modules), and the inaccessibility of vertically integrated platforms on which almost all development of IIoT solutions and products is carried out.

And if we talk about import substitution, then it is now achieved only in fairly simple technologies. Examples are domestic Edge gateways with foreign electronics and application software such as SCADA systems.

Why import substitution if everything is there? What slows down the IIoT?

According to analysts, the market growth in 2024 was caused, among other things, by the intensification of demand from enterprises for automation of production.

However, companies in their absolute majority continue to work on foreign products that are critical for providing basic operations - from programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to industrial platforms. In the current conditions, these products do not have development, and often normal support. But not everyone is in a hurry to change something.

Import substitution of these technologies often does not begin simply because enterprises do not believe in the existence of worthy Russian analogues and therefore do not allocate replacement budgets. But often the trigger of replacement is the emergence of an active and promising Russian vendor. Victor Polyakov, CEO of Tibbo Systems.

In this way, Tibbo Systems implemented a project at the enterprises of Gazprom Neft Group of Companies to deploy a fault-tolerant system for monitoring engineering data, implemented on the basis of the domestic IIoT platform AggreGate. Tibbo Systems has been engaged in digitalization projects since 2018, and every year there are more of them in the company's portfolio.

Practice: the project "Monitoring Center for Infrastructure of Gazprom Neft Group." Monitoring system

The system was deployed on an IaaS solution running the Russian operating system Astra Linux to monitor the parameters of almost the entire engineering infrastructure of Gazprom Neft Group of Companies, including its subsidiaries. Within the framework of this project and others, the mass of objects is monitored - from the data center infrastructure to multimedia systems in call rooms, from centrifugal oil pumps to coffee machines at gas stations.

The implementation of Tibbo AggreGate software had two goals: remote detection of hardware failures in the early stages in order to reduce the number of outages and reduce downtime, and prompt notification of personnel about incidents in the engineering infrastructure.

The customer had several problems:

1. in principle, there was no information in case of incidents and degradation of the quality of basic services. As a result, these moments could not only be promptly eliminated, but also identified;
2. progress of alarming events of engineering infrastructure, which led to a high risk of interruptions on systems;
3. uneven distribution of load on engineering systems, uncontrolled reliability of technical systems;
4. lack of remote coordination and monitoring of incident response activities. In this regard, there were serious difficulties in restoring the operability of engineering systems after accidents.

On the basis of Tibbo Systems AggreGate software (AggreGate SCADA/HMI + AggreGate Network Manager), a monitoring system was created - a complex of software and hardware to ensure the collection, processing, display and archiving of information about the monitoring or control object in real time.

The complex is integrated with corporate solutions of the customer, such as billing and postal services, corporate messenger, asset accounting system. Predictive analytics is used during monitoring: on the basis of machine learning models (a multi-layer perceptron algorithm, thanks to which the possibility of training models in real time is realized), recommendations for servicing battery for UPS are formed. It has a client-server architecture - the servers are located in the data center of St. Petersburg, and data from the equipment comes from several Russian regions.

The monitoring system under the supervision of the specialists of the customer's service and dispatching services controls both critical and non-critical systems, from power supply (UPS, BRP, power supply and transfer switch cabinets, rack load switches) and air conditioning to ventilation, water treatment and video surveillance.

Hardware components of the system are also of domestic production - controllers and sensors "ARIES," Segnetics, Fastwel, video cameras, sensors and protocol converters Bolid, RealLab; Netping monitoring devices and sensors. AggreGate also monitors Russian-made endpoints. These are MI and Shtil uninterruptible power supplies, coordinators for the operation of RBK-M air conditioners and Bolid gas fire extinguishing plants.

As a result of the implementation, the number of equipment outages was reduced, its downtime was reduced, and the rate of elimination of incidents arising during the operation of the engineering infrastructure increased.

Doubts and reality

Yes, according to official sources, the IIoT market is growing, but some experts doubt this, arguing that the use of IoT technology in industry today is very limited - primarily due to the lack of full integration with ERP systems. Allegedly, IoT today is only suitable for solving a number of applied and not particularly large-scale problems. Additional barriers - there are no alternatives to foreign solutions, there is not enough physical equipment^[1]

However, IIoT solutions are still in demand in transport, logistics, housing and communal services, not to mention production, and the practice of introducing IIoT from Tibbo Systems shows a picture slightly different from that seen by experts.

Agriculture and food industry. The IIoT platform AggreGate, implemented at the sugar production of Rusagro Group, made it possible to maximize the service life of the equipment due to the forecast of its possible malfunctions, as well as to prevent or minimize its downtime.

At the units of production units, sensors of domestic production were installed, collecting vibration and temperature indicators. The sensors are connected to a hub that transmits data wirelessly to the gateway every minute. The gateway sends JSON data to a cloud MQTT broker. The AggreGate server is then connected to the MQTT broker.

A special algorithm allows you to save the received data and analyze the historical values ​ ​ of the state of each unit and its nodes. When the alarm limits are exceeded, alarm messages are sent to the users with a detailed description of the alarm.

In another IIoT project for Rusagro, which was to organize monitoring of storage conditions and the state of sugar beets, the implementation of the platform reduced raw material stock losses by more than 20% and ensured an increase in productivity and profit due to maximum sugar production. Data from temperature, pressure, and sensors installed in the field CO2 are GPS GLONASS transmitted via non-standard protocols.

Smart Cities System. The implementation of the monitoring and management system based on the IIoT platform AggreGate made it possible to create a single monitoring and control point for many disparate network services on two sections of the federal highway in a short time.

The system maintains equipment on a site longer than 130 km, monitoring the status of more than 10 services, 50 servers and several hundred units of network equipment and workstations. The total number of connected devices is 1000. Information is also received from auxiliary equipment: this is necessary to control the parameters of the main one and receive signals in time if the data deviate from the regulatory ones. Monitoring is implemented on the basis of network and OS Windows server equipment Huawei and auxiliary equipment for climate control and uninterruptible power supply.

The resource and service model implemented in the project made it possible to significantly reduce the time for identifying problems in the system and prevent its long downtime. For comfortable control, the system has a visualization module and an access delimitation function.

On the basis of the AggreGate platform, a lot of projects have already been implemented: in transport industries (cloud service for monitoring fuel consumption and other ship parameters), (health care a comprehensive solution for dispatching engineering systems and accounting for energy resources of a pharmaceutical plant based on access technology LoRaWAN), telecommunications (communication node monitoring system for), in MTS production (data collection and analysis from controllers installed on CNC machines) and other areas.

Which vendor will stay afloat?

The experience of Tibbo Systems shows that the development of the IIoT market today is possible by providing customers with multidisciplinary (or complex) solutions from long-standing vendors in the market, which means that they can quickly accept the existing rules of the game.

There are several reasons here. Firstly, testing (in terms of information security, high load, etc.) and piloting many small and highly specialized products takes up significant resources even from very large companies.

Secondly, young vendors do not always act according to the rules of Western corporations familiar to big business. This is fraught with significant risks for customers. After all, the majority of Russian "vendors" combine the roles of a vendor, and an integrator, and a custom developer, and an engineering company, and even a training center - on the principle of "both a seamstress and a reaper." Simply - they do everything they are paid for. At the same time, such a versatile activity prevents them from building partner networks, and customers, on the other hand, effectively interact with them, diversifying and reducing the risks of unsuccessful implementation.

Thirdly, the ability of vendors to work with domestic IIoT equipment plays an important role.

The demand for products in any case will be: companies will have to replace the solutions that were introduced 5, 10, or even 20 years ago. This demand will give Russian vendors ON for IIoT a chance to equalize the level of their technologies with those offered by world leaders: large customers are quite discerning and are unlikely to agree to a deterioration in quality when replacing a product.

In addition, the demand for IIoT in almost all industries plays a role. This can be seen in practice: companies that are not waiting and not afraid are introducing industrial Internet of Things platforms and saving by optimizing their technical processes today, without waiting for global market growth.

It turns out that those vendors who can cope with rapid technological growth and quickly respond to both working conditions and demand have a chance to stay on the market. They will not only get a good share of the local market, but also - perhaps - a chance to export their products.

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