Forces behind IOT

Everybody in the industry is talking aloud for the IOT. It is always discussed in terms of billions of devices, their grows in coming years, changing business models, and adaptation to market etc. Connecting the things become so prevalent that every company want to expand there. Most companies are expanding themselves to build IOT centric products and services.  Neither the “Thing” nor the “Internet” is new, but there is so much hype of connecting the ordinary things to internet.  Who is actually making IOT, the IOT?

There are many industrial applications, which uses sensors and actuators, and they have been around a long, they were controllable remotely. So connected things were already there and the technology is enhanced with time. IOT is not just about connecting the ordinary things and make them accessible remotely, but it is much more than that.

The “Connected Things” become the “Internet of Things” when they are connected to people and their processes. Connected Things produce hugeamount of data which can be monitored and visualized remotely, but in the “Internet of Things” era this data is analyzed to generate useful insights and build patterns,  predict the situations, prescribe the solutions and instruct the ordinary thing so that the connected thing becomes a self-optimizing thing. The “Internet of Thing” is a package of :

• The things with capability to sense and act.
• Communication protocols to connect the things.
• Platform to collect, analyze and store the data. Predict the instructs the things.
• Network to connect all the things with platform.
• Strong visualization over the collected data, and interactive user interface monitor the things. 

The connected things of past to getting converted to the Internet of Things due to following supportive forces:

1. Reliance on Software - Usage of software is getting increased in making of the hardware better. Software plays critical role lot of mission critical applications
2. Technology commoditization – Technology is reaching in the hand of common people. We are living with it, our basics devices such as phones, watches, tv, washing machines, shoes etc are getting smarter. Technology is becoming affordable. Hardware is getting cheaper due to mass production, process enhancement.
3. Connection everywhere - Network speed and coverage is increasing. The world is getting more connected to the internet every day. Internet is getting cheaper and accessible. Communication overhead is reducing by better protocols, thus data access speed is increasing.
4. More data and more science – Necessity is the mother of invention, thus the focus of data analytics and science is increasing as more data is getting generated. Data storage capacity is also increasing with time.
5. Rapid development – Companies are investing in frameworks and platforms to build, deploy, and productionize the software faster. Cloud services are getting cheaper and easily accessible
6. Increase revenue by cost reduction - Enterprises are targeting to reduce cost by predictive maintenance, and self-optimizing machines.
7. Stay in the race - Predictions of IOT, everybody want to stay in the race due to the predictions of IOT in 2020 or so.

Following factors are obstacles in the IOT growth :

1. Lack of standards – Current IOT development is more of consensus based standards. Set of companies come together and define their own standard, and it is leading to interoperability problem.
2. Security tradeoff – IOT devices are smaller, less capable and may not perform well when high security standards are required.  
3. Investment – Lot of companies are talking about IOT but very few are really investing, most companies playing safe by wait and watch.
4. Huge ecosystem – IOT’s technical eco-system is huge, it involves everything from hardware, network, protocol, software, data science, data storage, mobility, IOT platform, cloud infrastructure, maintenance, integration services. It is really difficult for companies to build such as huge eco-system. Companies need to partner with specialists and share their customers and revenue.
5. Integration to existing infrastructure – Integrating IOT tech stack to traditional communication infrastructure is challenging , for eg. HTTPS, SSL, SOAP, RDBMS, SFTP for CRM, ERP, ECM portal.

Conclusion:

IOT is not new, it has been there for long, “Connected Things”/M2M of the past is today’s IOT with new set of communication protocol, improved hardware, better data collection, analytics capability with nice visualization to monitor and interact with IOT devices. There are lot of forces to keep IOT growing in future, but there are some obstacles also, which need to be crossed by the IOT providers.