I've actually wanted to do this for a while. I worked in large-scale analytics (Crittercism) and have a friend who does robotics work in Chicago.
I see two big problems here.
The first is, what's the business case for the buyer? What tangible improvement in their business is possible with all this new technology? Maybe less downtime? Predictive failure models? I feel like the tech is so disruptive, you'd be better off building a completely new factory from scratch rather than convincing an existing one to adopt such a radical process/ops change.
Second, there is a profound skepticism for large-scale software projects in true "industry". My father worked for a long time at Andrew, a maker of coaxial cable in Illinois, which was later acquired by Commscope; their view of software projects was a lot like war in 1984: a constant, ongoing struggle, with no end in sight, of huge promises and lack of good delivery. I'm not sure whether that means the barrier to entry is huge, or once you make great software you'll have a massive differentiated advantage -- probably both -- but just understand, these guys have spent their career dealing with vendors selling overpriced junk from Oracle, SAP, etc. and just expect things will fail from the getgo.
1) I assume you're referring to "Splunk for factories". You could make the same claim about plain-old Splunk. One business case is better real-time response to failure and later, better forensics. I agree, there are many factories where the process is perfected and the operators can read the tea leaves when something goes wrong. Another business case, and probably a better one, might be report generation for managers - people hate making the same reports over and over again.
2) Industrial software largely sucks now. But software in general sucked 20 years ago, and has improved much since then. True industry is behind the software curve by 10-20 years, so they are using old, bad (by today's standards) software. The thing is we've already improved that old, bad software - they just haven't adopted it yet. Once industry begins adopting "newer" software (think Java, .NET, web services) and they see the falling development costs and better features, they get behind it.
There is also a talent shortage in industrial software, because there are higher wages and better working conditions in the desktop, web, and mobile industries. However what has happened is we are now in diminishing returns in those latter three industries because they are saturated with talent, while all the cool things we've built to service those industries can now be repurposed by hard tech. It's the reverse of what happened after the Cold War ended and defense industry veterans fled for greener pastures in Silicon Valley.
I see two big problems here.
The first is, what's the business case for the buyer? What tangible improvement in their business is possible with all this new technology? Maybe less downtime? Predictive failure models? I feel like the tech is so disruptive, you'd be better off building a completely new factory from scratch rather than convincing an existing one to adopt such a radical process/ops change.
Second, there is a profound skepticism for large-scale software projects in true "industry". My father worked for a long time at Andrew, a maker of coaxial cable in Illinois, which was later acquired by Commscope; their view of software projects was a lot like war in 1984: a constant, ongoing struggle, with no end in sight, of huge promises and lack of good delivery. I'm not sure whether that means the barrier to entry is huge, or once you make great software you'll have a massive differentiated advantage -- probably both -- but just understand, these guys have spent their career dealing with vendors selling overpriced junk from Oracle, SAP, etc. and just expect things will fail from the getgo.