Great write-up, Rachael. At LNS Research, We speak with manufacturing and business leaders every week who are already leveraging or planning to use cloud, mobile, big data, and other collaboration-enabling technologies in their operations. The IoE is an interesting concept, and one that's popping up in our discussions more and more. We recently wrote an article on the future of cloud (linked below) tech in manufacturing and we'll be rolling out additional thoughts on the IoE soon.

http://blog.lnsresearch.com/blog/bid/183519/The-Future-of-Cloud-Based-Manufacturing-Applications