I²M²—The Future of Industrial Internet Monetization
wiring, mechanical equipment, etc.
It does not make sense to pay for
such physical components during
usage.
C HALLENGES AND O PPORTUNITIES
There are two main reasons why this type of
payment model does not exist today:
1. A typical large industrial system
incorporates many thousands of
components (physical parts, devices,
software) from many hundreds or
even thousands of different
builders. There is no efficient
manual tracking method possible to
deliver usage payments to all these
providers. Even traditional
automatic payment systems do not
really help: Using an individual
payment method for each
component (e.g. based on credit
card and serial numbers as with
today’s desktop software) would be
extremely cumbersome for the
operational user.
2. Some of such components are
payable upon delivery. This includes
physical building parts, electric
The first challenge could be solved with a
technical standard, which automatically
manages the payment for all components at
the operational user site by a centralized
cloud-based payment processor (see Figure
1). Much like a credit card clearance service,
this processor collects the money one time
per payment cycle (e.g. one month) from the
operational user and distributes it in
accordance with the agreed upon price to all
the builders of the components and the
system builder (as its share for planning,
designing and deploying the complete
system).
The second challenge (cost of physical
components) will not be fully eliminated in
the future but rather weakened: In recent
history the cost of physical components is
quite stable for most industrial systems. On
Figure 1: An automatic standardized payment system for industrial systems
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March 2018