Realising the true potential of IoT
While the Internet of Things (IoT) has been a hot topic of discussion within the IT industry for a number of years now, the majority of organisations have yet to feel the full force of its potential benefits.
However, that may be about to change over the next few years as IoT’s potential to empower businesses, governments, and even individuals in their decision making begins to reveal itself.
This will be driven by major developments in two specific technologies — IoT platforms and advanced analytics. The former, subject of much discussion in the past few years, is maturing; the latter is still in its infancy.
What is crucial about these developments is their ability to enable the vast amount of data that is generated by endpoints to be gathered, analysed, and turned into customer value.
The IoT market opportunity is infinite, and the industry, in its current state, has only addressed the tip of the iceberg so far — for example, for industrial maintenance, emergency services, and consumption efficiency.
However, IoT platforms are evolving rapidly, and their architecture is gaining significant sophistication, so we can expect to see other use cases begin to emerge.
At a basic level, these products connect devices, collect and manage vast amounts of data, and expose new insights to enterprises’ back-end systems or to third parties.
Benefits
The ability of these platforms to support the development of new applications that can underpin better and faster decision making is critical to the benefits that users will begin to experience over the coming years.
This industry is highly fragmented and dynamic and is subject to much merger and acquisition activity. No single vendor dominates this space; however, some large players are busily positioning their platforms and striking partnerships with large tech firms to create smart business solutions.
Interestingly, what they have in common is that they all utilise a platform-as-aservice (PaaS) strategy built upon powerful cloud infrastructure.
Survival
The success of these IoT platform vendors is best measured by the depth and breadth of their business ecosystem and their ability to attract and nurture app developers, software-as-aservice (SaaS) vendors, systems integrators, and other IT companies to build solutions on the top of their platforms.
Such bottom-up expansion is crucial for their survival. And needless to say, openness is the key commandment for such a collaborative model to survive.
Barriers
IoT platforms with strong integration or open programming interfaces have a good chance of thriving within their ecosystems. However, it’s not all rosy; indeed, there are a number of barriers that need to be addressed before IoT platforms can reach their full potential.
Security and privacy concerns represent the biggest of these barriers, as users tend to lose trust and underrate IoT if they feel the platform they are using is inadequately protecting their personal data.
The lack of common industry standards is another major issue, as it has transformed the promising cross-industry vision of an “Internet of Things” into many siloed “intranets of devices”.
Frustration among users
This particular barrier exists primarily because the largest, best established IoT companies are in no hurry to standardise, and it is seriously impeding innovation and growth in the industry.
The common practice of IoT vendors offering low dollar value quotes to get a foot in the door is also causing considerable frustration among users.
This strategy has led many users to lose confidence in the amount of infrastructure their organisation actually needs to acquire and implement before the full benefits of an IoT solution can be achieved.
User confidence
The lack of attention paid by vendors to presenting careful analysis of total cost of ownership for IoT deployments has further obfuscated user confidence and trust.
These concerns around security, return on investment, and industry-wide standardisation are not the only barriers that must be overcome, but they are certainly the most important if the true potential of the Internet of Things is to be realised any time soon.
■ Jyoti Lalchandani is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC). He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC. Content for this week’s feature leverages global, regional, and local research studies undertaken by IDC.