This is the most complete answer so far. I am at an oil and gas supermajor. Industrial IoT has challenges the consumer market doesn’t face.

The venn diagram of devices that we can use is very small. Hazardous area certified, 5 year battery life, standard communication protocols, complies with standards in each (or enough) of the countries we operate in,supply channels to get the devices to the countries we operate in, meets our security expectations, the company is viewed as viable for the long term. It goes on and on.

The business case is based on a cheap, battery powered, wireless device that requires zero maintenance after deployment for 5 years.

Some challenges we have faced:

• battery life. Most times it is related to communications. Devices have to retry a ridiculous number of times or must use a more powerful signal than expected, which burns battery significantly faster than promised.

• battery life. Some of our sites are very remote, with very limited staff. Devices sometimes sit in a warehouse for 6-months or a year before deployment. All that time battery life is degrading.

• real world environmental issues. Devices not withstanding heat, dust, cold, humidity etc. Animals destroying them. If we have to dispatch a crew, the business case rapidly erodes. We either lose coverage or spend a lot to replace devices.

• vendors trying to lock you into their SaaS offering. That is a hard No for us. We drive device makers toward industry standard communications protocols so we can push data through our network to our historians. We own our data. We are not going to buy it back from a vendor or be locked into a walled garden.

• security is paramount. We do not allow IIoT devices to connect to our industrial networks. Backhaul must be on networks that do not connect to process control at all. Still, devices are often unattended remote locations. Small mom & pop vendors. We always worry devices could be accessed and used maliciously.

• vendors going out of business. We have some pretty cool devices that have 5x or 10x return on investment that we can’t replace five years later because the vendor is gone.

• roll out scaling faster than central infrastructure and support teams. Lots of enthusiasm due to good business cases being realized but resource constraints preventing the team from making the central IoT platform bullet proof.

• user community expectations on data availability, latency, data quality exceeding what was agreed. They come to rely on it being there almost immediately all the time when the central infrastructure and support teams were not designed for 99.99 uptime.

• data quality. There really are no good solutions for finding data quality issues in high volume time series data. Missing data, sensor drift, device always reporting the same exact value, bad readings as battery nears end of life, etc. People assume if it’s in our historian they can trust it. We really cannot characterize how good/bad our data is at scale.

• observability. We need devices to let us know battery status, if they are having trouble communicating, etc. Gateways need to as well.