A Brief History of IoT
There is much hype about IoT and related technologies now; but how and when it all started - one must ask. Just a decade ago there was hardly any mainstream product in the consumer or corporate market. The momentum was built around 2007-2008 when first European IoT conference was held (http://www.the-internet-of-things.org/iot2008/), and the Internet of Things was "Born". Around the same time, U.S. National Intelligence Council listed the Internet of Things as one of the 6 "Disruptive Civil Technologies". In consumer market the idea sky rocketed when companies like Fitbit (started: 2007) and Withings (started: 2008) emerged in to the wearable landscape and started offering chic consumer products.Where is Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Now?
It's noteworthy to talk little bit about Machine-to-Machine (M2M) here. The terms was originally coined (back in early 2000) and stayed as a market buzz word until it was re-branded as IoT around 2014-2015 time frame. IoT encompasses this legacy concept with its much broader ecosystem now. Holler & Tsiatsis talk about this journey in their book, "From Machine-to-Machine to the Internet of Things: Introduction to a New Age of Intelligence".Landscape and Opportunities
New opportunities aligned with market demands boosts growth prospects. From telecom side, heavy weights, such as Telstra in Australia, Vodaphone in UK, Telenor in Norway, Telus in Canada, AT&T in USA and many others are offering bundled IoT solutions to their local markets. Technology giants, including Microsoft, Samsung, Google, Apple as well as legacy companies such as Cisco, Ericsson, BlackBerry, Nokia, Intel etc. are also vying for top spots in IoT spectrum.As technology gets matured and prices fell overtime, we observed significant rise in consumers' interest level surrounding smart and intelligent devices especially, the consumer gadgets. Whether its a home monitoring device or a fitness band, a smart meter or just about any portable, connected device, which can add convenience and can maximize operational efficiency, improve lifestyle and can reduce cost and motivate to stay healthy, users started to adopt this emerging trend at a faster pace.
Enterprises too are making use of cutting-edge technology for various reasons. One such reason could be motivating their employees to stay fit mentally and physically. Vitality (https://www.powerofvitality.com) is a company that offers services to enterprises allowing their employees to create customized wellness programs for healthier living. To monitor and reward based on real numbers, these programs are now integrated (via third party data platform) with health and fitness gears from Fitbit, Garmen, etc.
Notable Cloud based Solutions
There is more to IoT than just the devices - Take for example companies like Microsoft, which now offers IoT connectivity through Azure IoT suite. Samsung's Artik cloud (formerly called SAMI) is a Digital Health initiative creating an ecosystem allowing features, such as real time monitoring and remote controlling of IoT devices. Validic, a relatively newer player offers Digital Health platform for connecting multitude of devices and data sharing with service providers.Another industry veteran Salesforce is building an IoT cloud software (available later this year) on top of AWS, which will collect data from connected devices and gives recommended actions to sales and customer-service reps. Big data solution provider Cloudera offers a framework for sensor data analytics through its Hadoop powered cloud.
Now let's pivot our focus towards the raw data that these devices emit,which we call Big Data, and understand the value of information it holds especially for enterprises.
What is Big Data?
As per Wikipedia, big data is a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. This is the kind of data volume we hit, when overall number of connected devices goes into billions.Information Discovery - A Big Task
Processing all of this data from these connected endpoints is an exercise in big data. As a business you would need to sooner rather than later, work towards converging your cloud, big data and analytic solutions, so that as a business you can benefit from the valuable insight that this data holds.Modern businesses are driven by information, and the ones that have better and faster access to it hold competitive advantage of their rivals. From inventory management to sales forecast, these modern technologies can offer information on individual product up to the last sale point and helps calculate elasticity of demand and supply.
Data Analysis - A must for Businesses
Enterprises always had large volumes of data but never had the capability to analyze it in real-time. Big data solutions allow retailers to analyze data in real time. In high performance, high volume world of IoT, Big Data analytics offers deeper insights into the information and the expectations of end users.Below I touched upon some of the key technologies that can help materializing the big data promise and can significantly help enterprises in making data driven, real time business decisions.
- Predictive Data Modelling
- AI & Machine Learning
- Cognitive Computing
