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Six top tips for IoT success

From cars to kitchen appliances, warehouse management and agriculture to smarter cities, the pervasive opportunities presented by connected devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) to every imaginable industry are infinite. Even though we are still early in the adoption stages of IoT, there is widespread belief that we are teetering on the edge of an explosion that will make previous technology revolutions – such as the rise of social media – seem like small fry. If you think of the web browser as the first dimension of the internet and mobile the second, then IoT is the third, writes Matt Clarke, the chief technology officer at digital marketing, technology and commerce consultancy Amaze. (more…)

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May 23, 2016

Posted by: George Malim

Make your smart home smarter

Cast your mind back to the winter of 2014. The UK was at a complete standstill because of unexpected snow. Thousands of cars were left on the side of roads as the public was forced to trudge home in the freezing cold, the thought of being back in their home with the central heating on full blast the only thought encouraging them to keep on walking, writes Martin Woolley, the Bluetooth SIG technical programme manager. Alas! Nearly half way home they realised that they forgot to set the timer for the heating. If only they could set the timer remotely. (more…)

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April 29, 2016

Posted by: George Malim

IoT and transforming the digital enterprise

As IoT becomes integral to engineering and heavy industry, Michael Segal, the director of marketing at Netscout, discusses the digital transformation experienced by companies in these sectors and how the CIO will lead the transformation and ensure business assurance. (more…)

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April 27, 2016

Posted by: George Malim

Mark Armstrong

The old, new: Addressing the same old challenges in the Industry 4.0 environment

The latest industrial revolution – Industry 4.0 for those keeping count – conjures images of drones delivering parcels, self-driving cars, smart robotics and 3D printing, wrties Mark Armstrong the vice president and managing director for EMEA at Progress. The SmartThings Living Future report created by a group of academics and futurologists recently launched its vision of the future depicting 3D printed homes, downloadable food and underwater cities. But like Marty McFly’s hoverboard which really should have but never did come to pass, technologies can only develop as fast as their previous incarnations allow: they need to be built on solid foundations. (more…)

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April 4, 2016

Posted by: George Malim

Create value with the Medical Internet of Things (MIoT): Part 2

In the first part of this series, Bhoopathi Rapolu, the head of analytics for EMEA at Cyient,  discussed how the increasing connectivity of medical devices – or the Internet of Things (IoT) – is leading to an explosion in healthcare big data. In turn, this growing bank of data is opening up new avenues for healthcare operations, which has the potential to totally transform the way we look at healthcare. In this second and final part of the series, he explores further ways in which healthcare organisations can look to take full advantage of the IoT. (more…)

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March 29, 2016

Posted by: George Malim

Why all your data matters for IoT business impact – Part One

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become one of the biggest areas of hype and marketing spend within the IT sector. However, the technologies involved in IoT are becoming quietly  widespread throughout the enterprise and public sector organisations and in a recent report, Gartner predicted that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use in 2016 – that’s 30% more than in 2015. Regardless of the hype, this is happening in every enterprise, writes Patrick McFadin, a Cassandra Evangelist at DataStax. (more…)

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March 4, 2016

Posted by: George Malim

Investment and innovation in the UK’s automotive industry is bringing social benefits and productivity gains

Recently BBC News quoted former VW group president and now head of the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership, Jonathan Browning. He cited foreign investment as key to the region’s spectacular recovery that has lead to the lowest unemployment for 30 years and the region becoming the ‘brains’ of the UK vehicle industry, writes Stephen Chadwick, the managing director for EuroNorth at Dassault Systèmes. (more…)

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March 3, 2016

Posted by: George Malim

How to avoid an internet of exploited things

Adoption of the Internet of Things is proceeding quickly and although most people don’t yet have a smart refrigerator or toaster in their home, smart has taken off in certain market segments, writes Christian Fredrikson, the chief executive of F-Secure. TVs, fitness tracking devices, home monitoring systems and personal wearable devices are all hot products for connectivity, and it’s only a matter of time before other segments follow. Gartner tells us that by 2020, 25 billion devices will be connected. (more…)

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March 1, 2016

Posted by: George Malim

Work Automation – the impact of IoT and Robotics

Digitisation is often characterised through a number of key technologies such as social, mobile, analytics, cloud and IoT. However, the real impact of digitisation is echoed in the corridors of small, medium and especially large enterprises through digital transformation (DX), writes Dr Setrag Khoshafian, the chief evangelist and vice president of BPM technology at Pegasystems. (more…)

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February 17, 2016

Posted by: George Malim

The reality distortion field of IoT
By 2020, Gartner predicts that 20.8 billion connected things will be in use worldwide, across consumer and enterprise use cases, writes Mike Crooks, the head of Innovation at thr Mubaloo Innovation Lab. This year alone, Gartner expects 5.5 million new things will get connected every day, leading to services spending around IoT reaching $235 billion by the year end.
Everywhere you look, there is a vast amount of hype about what IoT delivers, where the market is heading and what can be achieved. We’d be forgiven for thinking that IoT is already a complete world changer, that is fundamentally changing the dynamics of how we live and work. 

In some cases, of course, it’s true. The average person may never be aware of the impact that IoT is having.

We live in a world that is more connected than ever. The farming industry is going through a large change, where its equipment is becoming ever smarter and more autonomous. Cars are starting to have autonomous capabilities, with the ability to self diagnose and trigger maintenance alerts. Smart thermostats are being installed in an increasing number of homes. All the big technology companies are turning more attention, and more money into the entire IoT ecosystem.

Yet, this would be masking over the reality of IoT. IoT has the potential to help us drive improvements in virtually every aspect of the way in which we live and work; but questions remain as to whether the world needs a tweeting toaster or a smart wardrobe.

In reality, how can we be close to the vision of IoT, when so much of the world and so many companies still aren’t properly utilising or understanding technologies that have been around for decades? The majority of companies hear terms like Cloud, Big Data and Mobile and admit that they are still stuck with legacy infrastructure, with no real clue as to how to move forward.

One of the big blockers for IoT over the past few years is that every company with a vested interest in it, has wanted to control it. This has led to any external customer, be it a consumer wanting a smart home, or an enterprise wanting smart infrastructure, having to use multiple systems. 

Many of the IoT deployments at the moment focus on the dots that get joined within an organisation, connecting their own assets and their own infrastructure. The vision of IoT that has been propagated over the past few years is that systems will share data, so that across the entire chain, transformation will take place.

Larger companies in every industry are currently struggling with a very real issue of transformation at the moment. In many cases, companies are skirting around their core infrastructure and using middleware as a way of doing iterative changes. IoT for the majority of companies is something that they see as a distant possibility on their roadmap, not something that they are able to pay much attention to now.

One of the major challenges with the reality of IoT is this; companies still aren’t able to properly understand the data being generated at the moment. It doesn’t matter how much infrastructure companies put in place or how connected the world may be, if they aren’t able to use that information properly, the ability to collect data is irrelevant

IoT is as much about what is happening in the background to understand and process the information as it is about the way in which that data is collected. If we look at the consumer market, Waze is, in many ways the perfect example of IoT in action. It turns millions of cars into a live data feed of road conditions and traffic information. This is fed through the app to help people optimise their driving, which is also fed into Google’s services, to the extent that Google Now is able to recommend that you leave earlier for a meeting.

It’s the intelligence that makes this useful and powerful, but this is precisely where companies struggle. The choices of whether to utilise cellular M2M, Sigfox, Wi-Fi technologies or Bluetooth; the sensors that you deploy — all of it means nothing without being able to analyse the data in real time.

In the enterprise space, this means that we will continue to see closed networks, where the value of deployment is to that company, and that company alone. Some data feeds may be opened up, but a vast amount of data will be kept private. Companies may not want to open up data about predictive maintenance for their assets or equipment, for understandable competitive reasons.

(more…)

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February 2, 2016

Posted by: George Malim