We are in the midst of a transition between ages.
Data is everywhere. Computers will soon be in nearly every pocket and screens are increasingly being strapped to more and more wrists and heads. Even our homes, a thing that you wouldn’t necessarily have pegged as a data-intensive environment, have become Smart with a capital S, capable of unlocking your front door, adjust the thermostat and turn on the lights with just the wave of a phone.
And though the impact of these technologies is first being felt by consumers, companies are in no way exempt from their potential disruption.
Which is why most smart businesses, especially legacy companies like Caterpillar, are investing in research and development and spending a lot of time in the lab trying to figure out how best to apply new technology to make their businesses stronger, while making their customers more capable.
Recently, Cat gave Equipment World a peek behind the R&D curtain at the DMDII manufacturing research laboratory inside UI Labs in Chicago. While there, we got an up-close look at how the company is already using virtual reality to design its heavy equipment and how it’s researching augmented reality as a way to train service technicians.
While speaking at an event on disruptive technology during Chicago Ideas Week October 15, the president of the Internet of Things Consortium and a developer of IoT technologies at Google, Mark Spates, said we are transitioning from the Information Age into the Intelligence Age. We know how to generate data by the boatload. The Intelligence Age will be defined by how we use it.
At that same event Caterpillar CEO Doug Oberhelman said that is just what his 90-year-old company is trying to do. It’s the reason the company invested in and partnered with analytics firm Uptake—to monitor data created by Cat machines and learn to take meaningful action on that data in order to prevent downtime.
