Internet of Things (IoT) – Next Revolution?

If you were to ask me what the invention of the century was, without blinking an eye I’d tell you it was the Internet. It is the most significant and influential foundation for mankind in my opinion. The Internet has completely revolutionized the world and brought people closer to each other than ever before.

The introduction of powerful mobile devices combined with the influence of the Internet has not only changed the way we do business, but also the way we conduct our everyday lives. Just imagine services the population at large use and what we currently offer our customers. Think if that would be possible if not for the Internet? Difficult to imagine, isn't it!  

In my opinion, the Internet of Things (IoT) is going to be a major driving force in Enterprise IT since the advent of the Internet. Transformation is happening as I write this article and devices are shifting from isolated systems to ubiquitous IoT enabled systems.

What is IoT?

Think of IoT as a combination of hardware and software technology producing trillions of data through a set of interconnected multiple devices and sensors with the cloud and making sense of this data with intelligent tools. Literally anything could be an IoT device if it can send/receive data over the cloud and is designed to process a unique task using cloud recommendations. A favorite example of mine is that of a car that automatically senses wear and tear and automatically schedules the maintenance.

Though the term was not officially coined until 1999, the Internet of Things has been in development for decades. Believe me not, the first Internet appliance was a Coke machine at Carnegie Melon University in the early 1980s. The programmers could connect to the machine over the Internet, check the status of the machine and determine whether or not there would be a cold drink awaiting them, should they decide to make the trip down to the machine. Isn’t that cool?

Cisco IBSG says the Internet of Things was “Born” sometime between 2008 and 2009. It also expects 25 billion devices to be connected to the Internet by 2015 with an additional increase to 50 billion by 2020.

IoT Market

The other day I was reading a few reports about IoT that intrigued me. The McKinsey Global report from May 2013 says that the economic impact of IoT devices will increase by a whopping three trillion dollars to six trillion dollars by 2025. Also, the Gartner report of 2014 puts IoT market revenue at about three hundred billion by 2020. Imagine 31 billion devices and 4 billion people connected to the Internet by 2020. Assuming we don’t have a population explosion in the near future (that’s just me trying some dry humor), this statistic translates to an average of 7 to 8 devices per person connected by Internet. A global mobile data forecast done in 2012 expects that by 2017, 1.7billion M2M connections would be established (that is a growth rate of 36%). There’s a lot of math going on here so bear with me. All these reports point towards one common thing - the data usage per M2M module is going to increase from 64MB in 2012 to 330MB by 2017 per month. Another interesting report I came across is a report published by ABI research. By 2016, sales of wearable wireless medical devices will grow by more than a hundred million every year with revenues exceeding by roughly an additional three billion US dollars.

From all these reports and studies, one thing is certain - there is going to be a huge impact on life, business and global economy.  There will be a flood of raw, unstructured and unpredictable data exchange that will happen between devices/cloud services.

IoT Challenges

Of course, where is the thrill with inventions if there are no challenges? IoT has spared neither the solution providers nor enterprise organizations. As a solution provider, the biggest challenge is migrating from IP4 to IP6. Imagine finding a smarter way to address and uniquely identify over 50 billion devices!

Some other challenges that need to be addressed include investing in self-sustaining IoT devices that are capable of using environmental elements like wind, water, light, and sound to create energy. Just think of the impact that can have on our diminishing supplies of natural gas and oil! We are in an age of rapidly advancing technology and that makes it even more important for us to focus on strengthening the system security. We are going to need better data compression techniques, enhanced data security algorithms combined with superior high performance cloud computing methods and analytical tools tuned for getting the most optimum performance.

The task is cut out for enterprise organizations too. They will need to clearly understand the total Cost of Ownership (TCO) (Please use IDC Workbook to evaluate TCO). In addition, it is important to make sense of incoming data so that appropriate decision-making systems that can handle enormous volumes of data can be built. The real challenge in my opinion lies in achieving all this using existing IT infrastructure.

IoT Cloud building considerations

Some things to consider when building an IoT cloud is to include support for  

• connecting IoT devices through internet either directly or using gateways (microcontrollers). IoT device can connect to gateway using any communication method like 2G/3G/4G, Bluetooth, Ethernet, ZigBee, Serial/USB, VPN, WI-FI access point, MQTT etc.
• having open adapters to connect with other IoT clouds and facilitating real-time synchronization, and services ready to configure and manage more IoT devices on go, identify and authenticate IoT device and apply/map appropriate service etc. The cloud should also have ready-to-integrate vertical platform layers and support to easily configurable public, private and/or hybrid clouds
• facilitating on-demand or periodic analytics, insight services, and remote management using panels and GUIs
• providing a service creation layer for development/interface community. These services may include Data services, business services, partner services etc.
• scalable yet robust secured compressed data communication layers

Applications using IoT

There is no limit for imagination when it comes to the potential applications of IoT.  There could literally be a billion use cases and each use case of IoT can have several interpretations that only add additional layers of complexity to potential use cases. It’s human nature to want maximum benefits with minimum risk. But in order to get there as far as IoTs are concerned, a mature approach is definitely the need of the hour.

My favorite application of IoT would be in the healthcare industry. I think that this is one industry where IoT can create waves while adding value to social life. IoTs can potentially be used in real-time monitoring and patient diagnosis. There is a great shift in how healthcare services are offered by providers using TeleHealth service. In the US, a provision of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 has made providing healthcare in remote locations a reality. Interested in reading about this? Just navigate to my previous blog. If you ask me, without IoT TeleHealth is impossible. Unification of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is just the tip of the iceberg. Integrating this data (EMR) with IoT devices and embedded sensors in real-time to automatically alert doctors and patients of medical issue is critical. Once it is integrated, it doesn’t stop with alerting but also facilitates the doctors to diagnose patients remotely. Just think of the number of lives we can save when this technology goes global!

IoT wouldn’t be so popular if not for the advantages it offers. Let’s just say it has and will make our lives so much easier. Some of its benefits include:

1. Real-time visibility into processes that enables quicker and better decision making
2. Helps enterprise businesses to crack new opportunities, improve productivity, improve customer experience and win the competition
3. Analyze data in real-time to understand current trends, spot opportunities, identify new revenue streams, predict customers and partners so that service can be improved
4. Provide personalized service – In Healthcare personalized drug is on its way. This is not possible without continuous reading the patient data. The continuous reading is possible only using IoT

Ok it’s time for me to hit the bed but before that, I’m going to just sum up everything I just said above. As per Cisco’s report of 2013, by the year 2025 the Internet of Things will drive roughly fifteen trillion US dollars in corporate revenue. IoT represents the next big technological revolution. Evolution of technology and network bandwidth is together turning data into information, knowledge, and wisdom. IoT has the potential to change the world, as we know it today. Most of big enterprise organizations have already started re-aligning their current infrastructure to handle the massive IoT devices and their data streams. There’s no better time for you to start. Get set…go!

Cheers,

Venkat Alagarsamy