Internet of Things: Improvements in Sensors, Networking and Analytics will Drive IoT

Cisco predicts that Internet of Things technology will power $14.4 trillion in company profits by 2020 and that in 2013, the Internet of Things (IoT) is generating $613 billion in profits for businesses.  Cisco believes in the potential of IoT and recently reorganized, creating a new business unit and investment fund for the Internet of Things.

Just what is the Internet of Things?  Charu C. Aggarwal, researcher at IBM along with others, wrote that “the internet of things refers to uniquely addressable objects and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure. Such objects may link to information about them, or may transmit real-time sensor data about their state or other useful properties associated with the object…  The vision of the internet of things is that individual objects of everyday life such as cars, roadways, pacemakers, wirelessly connected pill-shaped cameras in digestive tracks, smart billboards which adjust to the passersby, refrigerators, or even cattle can be equipped with sensors that can track useful information about these objects.  Furthermore, if the objects are uniquely addressable and connected to the internet, then the information about them can flow through the same protocol that connects our computers to the internet.”

A report from ARM found that “the Internet of Things (IoT) is an idea whose time has finally come. Falling technology costs, developments in complementary fields like mobile and cloud, together with support from governments have all contributed to the dawning of an IoT ‘quiet revolution’. Now, after more than a decade of slow progress, the business community is beginning to look seriously at the IoT—to the extent that a mere 6% of business leaders believe that the idea of IoT is simply hype…”

Some of the findings of the ARM report include:

• 23 percent think that IoT will have an impact on their business model and strategy
• 30 percent think that IoT will result in new products and services created from existing ones
• 95 percent think that their company will begin using IoT within three years
• 68 percent of companies have already made some level of investment in IoT
• 65 percent think that failing to adopt IoT in a timely will will cause their company to be left behind the competition

Ian Ferguson, VP of Segment Marketing at ARM, told TRPro that “I think it’s surprising that manufacturing and construction were ahead of IT, who you might expect to be out in front with this kind of thing, but IoT provides them with immediate wins in terms of cost saving.  For example, deploying sensors to find out where leaking pipes or resources are, how loaded machines are and where trucks might be are examples of direct immediate ways to save money… There’s also an opportunity for IoT to create new services and improve customer service, but the latter is a little fluffier in terms of ROI.”

Simon Segars, CEO at ARM, said that “putting this [IoT] all together is quite difficult. It requires lots of skills. The promise of IoT is great, but it does need a lot of skills from different disciplines to actually come together to make it a reality. Implementing IoT isn’t about sensors. It’s not about networking. It’s not an analytics problem. It’s all of those.”