Internet of Things: Turning Opportunities Into Outcomes #exsum13

Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive for Software & Systems at IBM, claims that the Internet of Things is past the tipping point. It is the future AND it’s already here. If you are in a rapidly expanding industry, your boat should rise, and this market surely seems to be expanding: There are already an amazing 9 billion connected devices in the world today, but this number is expected to explode to anywhere between 50 billion and 1 trillion (!) devices. A McKinsey report on Disruptive Technologies from May 2013 finds that ‘things’ will create a market of between 2.7 trillion dollar and 6.2 trillion dollar annually by 2025. Financial or economic imperatives drive these innovations. IBM launched Smarter Planet, which coincides with IoT. It’s for a large part about data: Smarter Planet, and “Internet of Things’ is about things being Interconnected, Instrumented and Intelligent. The impact on many industries for the coming decade is in the trillion of dollars in change in scope, reach and productivity.  Of course, there are some serious technology challenges and barriers to the IoT. These are for example the need for low cost, energy self-sustaining sensors, interoperability standards, deployment of IPv6 and the availability of software that can aggregate and analyze data. Technology challenges may lie in processing the data volume, achieving interoperability etc. Anyone who is in manufacturing knows of these challenges, because they have been working at IoT for decades, aiming for predictive maintenance and quality control. Wiring in more Things reduces operational cost, improves asset productivity and increases process efficiency. Similarly for smart energy meters or smarter healthcare monitoring: better information can improve the outcome, as long as care is taken to present information in an easy to digest manner.  Who are the buyers? Today, Things initiatives are mostly started by the expertise owners, the business people with some IT knowledge. ‘In my view’, Mr Mills said, ‘Things is both evolutional and transformational: it has to be evolutional to make it stick, and it’s not as if we’re suddenly doing this for the first time.’ Economics are critical, as much as technology is an enabler in itself, but the economics lead to the rapid adoption. And how does the global security discussion play into this? Ideally the government would show an interest for critical infrastructure, in a multi-supplier concern. But if that will become reality soon?