From Prediction to Propulsion: RTI’s Journey in Industrial IoT

If you haven’t seen it yet, read RTI’s latest press release announcing our significant expansion in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The news underscores why now is a pivotal moment for RTI. While the financial metrics are impressive, what truly excites us are the real‑world applications we’re developing—carbots, renewable energy solutions, smart healthcare devices, hyperloop prototypes, flying cars, wind turbines, CT scanners, and more. Innovation continues to arrive daily.

How did a relatively small organization like RTI become a key player across such diverse sectors? On this Thursday, in celebration of #TBT, I’ll trace the milestones that led us here.

For the RTI historians among us, the turning point came in 2005 when we sold our tools business to Wind River, accounting for 80% of our revenue at the time. The 2006 year left us with solid capital and a talented team but a lack of product pipeline. We pivoted toward emerging trends, and our 2006 vision paper, The Data-Centric Future, outlined what would become the Industrial IoT:

Truly profound technologies become part of everyday life. Motors, plastics, computers, and now networking have made this transition in the last 100 years. These technologies are embedded in billions of devices; they have melted into the assumed background of the modern world.

Another step is emerging in this progression: pervasive, real-time data. This differs from the Internet in that this pervasive information infrastructure will connect devices, not people. Just as the “web” connected people and fundamentally changed how we all interact; pervasive data will connect devices and change how they interact.

Today’s network makes it easy to connect nodes, but not easy to find and access the information resident in networks of connected nodes. This is changing; we will soon assume the ability to pool information from many distributed sources, and access it at rates meaningful to physical processes. Many label this new capability the “network-centric” architecture. We prefer the term “data centric” because the change, fundamentally, is driven by a fast and easy availability of information, not the connectivity of the network itself. Whatever the name, it will drive the development of vast, distributed, information-critical applications.

Replacing “pervasive information infrastructure” with “Industrial IoT” would have been a prescient prediction. The term “PII” never gained traction, but the concept has since become a cornerstone of modern industry. By 2012, before the IoT was mainstream and before the Industrial Internet Consortium launched its Industrial IoT standards in 2014, our handbook entry expanded on this vision:

There is amazing value in distributed information. Connecting people to information transforms society – news feeds, weather satellites, and the Internet are only a few examples – timely information flow drives value in every industry and every endeavor.

However, current technologies only connect people at human speeds. There’s an entirely new opportunity to connect machines at physics speeds. Just as the Internet connected people and fundamentally changed how we all interact, a new "pervasive information infrastructure" will connect devices at speeds fast enough to drive distributed applications. RTI’s people and technology are the best in the world at delivering that data to the right place at the right time. We fundamentally connect complex systems at extreme speeds better than any organization on the planet.

Our technology enables tens, or hundreds, or thousands, or (soon) millions of processors to work together as a single application. Why does that matter? Because intimately-connected systems can do things that weakly-connected systems cannot. They can request and access data from far-flung reaches fast enough to react intelligently. They can read deeply-embedded sensors, use that data to control high-speed machines, and feed the results to the enterprise for monitoring and optimization. This powerful connectivity is a fundamental transformation that will make currently difficult things commonplace and currently impossible things possible. We are already working on many of these applications. Our work will help astronomers probe the deepest reaches of space, protect passengers from injury on tomorrow’s roads, make our nation more secure from attack, and improve the efficiency of renewable energy generation. RTI is leading the new wave of large connected systems, systems that work together as one.

So how did we move from prediction to execution? It’s simple: the Industrial IoT has been our focus for over a decade. With an early‑mover advantage, RTI transitioned from forecasting to delivering the infrastructure that powers the future.

Our new tagline—"RTI lives at the intersection of functional artificial intelligence and pervasive networking"—captures our dual focus. AI and connectivity are the twin engines that will shape the next 40 years. Together, they unlock new possibilities across every industry: from autonomous vehicles and smart hospitals to green energy and beyond. The Industrial IoT is more than a label; it’s a new backbone for the world. As every device joins a connected, intelligent network, the resulting infrastructure will make everything more efficient, useful, and user‑friendly.

It is an honor to lead the next wave of the IIoT revolution and to work alongside the visionary technologists at RTI who made this journey possible.