Enabling IoT: A Framework for Vertical Solutions

In Part 2, Enabling IoT: Infrastructure and Functional Autonomy, we claimed that IoT may be argued to have been enabled when Infrastructure and Functional Autonomy come together to seamlessly achieve intelligent operational efficiencies that realize value.

Here we examine a framework for enabling IoT for industry verticals.

A word to the wise: the framework as presented below is likely to appear pedestrian and rather coarse grained in context of the hyped expectations created by the promise of IoT. Most of those expectations continue to remain valid and realizable. We have simply limited the environment and bounded the scope of this particular discussion in order to create a simplified picture.

A Framework for Vertical Solutions

In order to be relevant to a user base, a portfolio of IoT-enablement offerings needs to be vertically oriented towards industries and/or applications served. Domain knowledge of end-user applications is essential to creating effective offerings. While traditional network devices, connectivity and computing may be thought of as horizontal enablers of IoT, they constitute only the infrastructure component. The component of functional autonomy must come from software offerings which may be home-grown, or developed, as, for example, in the case of Industrial Automation, in collaboration with lighthouse customers such as, perhaps, Siemens, Rockwell or GE and in collaboration with enterprise solution vendors such as Oracle or SAP, potentially including specialized niche providers in the areas of machine shop scheduling, process automation and control, and distribution logistics.

Fig. 1. IoT infrastructure and Functional Autonomy enabler examples for a Consumer Packaged Goods Company.

Figure 1 above shows a typical enterprise scenario to illustrate how both network infrastructure and functional autonomy come together to enable IoT for a hypothetical consumer packaged goods (CPG) company. Note, however, that this is still essentially a privately owned network scenario. We shall examine the need for transition to global public networks in a later post.

Beyond the Obvious

It is obvious that while in our example above we conjure up a picture – both literally and figuratively – of a potentially autonomous environment, we haven’t made any particular excursions in our text beyond what is clearly yesterday’s technology. The reason for that is to set a context to what we intend to discuss next: the additional framework that is required, on top of networks, computers and ERP systems, to make IoT a reality: a framework and components that enable autonomous operation.

What if we were to say in the same article where we just made a case for domain knowledge that there is a possibility we may be able to conceive a framework that may not require domain knowledge of vertical applications at all? All that it would need to do is enable those who already have the domain knowledge.

While it was rather inclusive of us to count people, processes, data and things in our definition of IoT in Part 1 of this series, it will have, doubtless, occurred to the reader that the first three of those still need “things” or products to communicate and interact with the rest of the environment.

Those components include hardware and software at the product node level, communications protocols between products and cloud and several other components within the cloud itself.That framework can be created quite independent of domain knowledge of vertical applications.

We intend to discuss those components, which some have begun to call a connected product technology stack, in a forthcoming part of this series.

[Note: The icons used in the graphic above have been sourced from various free online resources. The graphic itself is being published for the first time with this post, and may be freely used, with attribution to this author.]

See Part 4: One With Everything.