February 24, 2016
Posted by: George Malim
Forty years ago, I worked on software that monitored and controlled its physical environment, in telephone exchanges, writes Dr. Chris Harding is Director for Interoperability at The Open Group. I have been away from that world for a long time, but am now becoming involved with similar problems, as I work on standards for the Internet of Things (IoT). (more…)
February 18, 2016
Posted by: George Malim
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…)
February 17, 2016
Posted by: George Malim
Our counting of IoT platforms has exceeded 300, writes Saverio Romeo, the principal analyst at Beecham Research. There are now more than 300 solutions that identify themselves as IoT platform offering a variety of services, from device management to data management passing by API management. (more…)
February 16, 2016
Posted by: George Malim
Something historical happened at the beginning of 2015. For the first time in human history, the number of people living in cities was larger than the number of people living in rural areas, writes Stephen Chadwick, the managing director for EuroNorth at Dassault Systèmes. (more…)
February 11, 2016
Posted by: George Malim
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0 are becoming two of the most overused industrial automation buzzwords today, writes Dave Sutton a product marketing manager at Schneider Electric. The explosion in domestic Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as smartphones, wearables and even fridges is a key driver for this, but is there more to it than the surrounding hype? (more…)
February 10, 2016
Posted by: George Malim
Who would have thought that the Internet of Things (IoT) could impact anything from artificial insemination of cows to supply chain management decisions, writes Nick Finch, the technical director of Concentra? (more…)
February 9, 2016
Posted by: George Malim
The first wave of connectivity to serve the continent of Africa was mobile communications; in fact more than double the population in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has mobile phone access compared with access to paved roads, writes Stephen Stewart, the regional director for Africa at Eseye. (more…)
February 8, 2016
Posted by: George Malim
Intelligent device manufacturers are operating in an environment that is more demanding than ever: devices are becoming more interconnected in the Internet of Things (IoT), profit margins on those devices are being squeezed as competition heats-up across a global stage, and customers are demanding more flexibility in tailoring products to their needs than ever before, writes Vincent Smyth, the vice president for EMEA at Flexero Software. (more…)
Posted by: George Malim
IT is no longer the sole guardian of technology in the business. From IP enabled turnstiles to smart manufacturing systems that continuously monitor and optimise performance and smart buildings with IP connected environmental controls, the Internet of Everything (IoE) is slowly but inexorably expanding across every business environment, writes John Pepper, the chief executive and founder of Managed 24/7.
Right now, however, these deployments remain completely separate from the core business network – and IT has little or no visibility of IoE deployments. While companies are gaining operational benefits, these siloed deployments also represent significant operational risk. Security is the primary concern, but organisations are also missing out on essential business information. By failing to consolidate IoE deployments into the core network, organisations cannot enable CxOs to take advantage of a depth of real time analytics that should be informing changes to every part of the building, estate and production systems.
It is, therefore, no surprise that there is a growing CxO push to integrate IoE into the existing corporate network, not least to exploit IT’s security expertise. Few CxOs even consider any difficulties arguing, quite reasonably, that there is little or no difference between an IP enabled temperature sensor and any cloud based application. However, there is one fundamental and essential difference to consider: IT systems are still managed on the basis of 99.999% – five nines – availability; IoE demands 100% availability – failure is simply not an option.
A small but growing minority of IT organisations have therefore begun to explore the value of consolidating monitoring tools to move beyond break/fix to a predictive model that delivers 100% uptime. End to end monitoring that accurately predicts trends in performance combined with self-healing technologies both prevent problems and enable organisations to achieve far more effective IT utilisation.
Given the speed with which devices are becoming Internet enabled, there is no time to delay. But organisations have some tough questions to consider. From ownership to budget, capacity planning to network audit and security, organisations need to determine where the responsibility lies for this new connected model – and, critically, ensure IT embraces the predictive approach required to deliver the 100% availability now required of these essential systems.
The role of IT is changing; today’s requirement to support servers is evolving fast to one that is about managing millions of connected devices, from coffee machines to life saving NHS equipment. IT needs to step up quickly to embrace this critical, predictive model for every aspect of the corporate infrastructure.
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February 5, 2016
Posted by: George Malim
