IOT - 101

“Internet of things” is probably the worst tech term, in Internet-telco world, though history gave us better names except that the word internet was missing in the title only i.e. ‘Pervasive computing’, ‘Ubiquitous computing’ and ‘Device to Device communication’; Let’s give the credit to Kevin Aston, cofounder and executive director of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, who says “I could be wrong” but again it was 1999 and scope and vision was limited. Since then the term “Internet of things” made its way in every document from Scientific American to European Union Conference and still abundantly confusing and unanimously mis-understood.

Let’s go back in time to understand how these things came together, we learnt that PC didn’t make much value until it was networked. And then we saw the importance of “internet” from being the product for “people” to the product for the “things”. The coke vending machine in Carnegie Melon University in 1980 could be connected over internet for general maintenance, was probably the first example of Internet of things. So if the concept was already there decades back, then what’s new today?

It is the sheer ubiquity of the most advanced technologies in our lives, the speed of change and the accelerated adoption worldwide that’s making all the difference. This speed of change is following Kurzweil’s ‘law of accelerating returns’ i.e. the more advanced we become, the faster we become at advancing. It is the impact of the IoT in common man’s life that makes it exciting. Let’s see how.

Since the beginning our planet had been generating enormous amounts of data but we were not able to see, hear and capture it, but now we can, and as we transform raw data into wisdom, the whole planet is going to become a central nervous system. This transformation involves analyzing a seemingly infinite amount of data and converting it into infinite decisions, out of which only a limited set will actually be automated initially, as we can assume today. Technological waves like data pipes getting cheaper and more accessible,
electronic circuits getting smaller and cheaper, possibility to sense data in so many ways, are setting up the stage for the grand “convergence” of wireless technologies, MEMS and internet, which can be used in converting everyday objects into mini computing devices that can be identified uniquely, have an IP address, can sense and can communicate. IoT will be a system of systems, talking to each other, taking intelligent actions which overall makes the entire system more efficient.

We have seen human controlled automation, however, with a network of connected objects world-wide, acting as proactive agents on our
behalf, converting relevant data into useful autonomous actions, with reduced human supervision; Endless possibilities can be imagined. This is the time for real digital revolution, IoT will challenge the conventional concept of CRM. It will make facebook look like a minor event as John Barett Says. People will be able to search physical things, there will be no such thing as “lost”. There will be no blind spot, everything will be visible and traceable. People, animals, buildings, vehicles, machines, objects, plants and land, all fall in the definition of “things”. Juniper research says, in 2015, there were 13.4 billion devices connected to internet. By 2020, there will be 50 billion things connected together according to Statista.com. The IoT is happening today, and it’s happening fast.

IoT brings game changing business opportunities for application developers, IT security providers, internet service providers, manufacturers of sensors and embedded systems. According to McKinsey Global Institute report (Jul 2015), IoT has a total potential economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025 across multiple sectors. Business leaders are taking interest in
engaging with academia, startups and investing in internal lean startups to innovate in IoT domain.

What does this remind you of? Terminator: Rise of the Machines, let’s not get maddened by the exaggeratedly efficient AI over-powering human intelligence. However, there will be risks which should be taken seriously as an industry. Our software programs will take care of some actions for us, and we’ll have to sacrifice some controls. We’ll need to create legal frameworks to account for the bad decisions and bad actions done by autonomous automated machines. Privacy will be a word unknown and meaningless to many people. There
will be a need to define rights for personal data and global data privacy policy. We have seen the horror stories of viruses, worms and hacking to WWW, and with IoT we have created a new attack surface, which will scale up as we expand in IoT, so if everything is connected and accessed from internet, impact of damages due to viruses and hacking will pose death risks, threat to health and safety, and economic loss.

There are several challenges to realizing the IoT dream; Technological interoperability tops the list, different vendors are building their own silos, everyone plugs differently into the ecosystem, it’s a challenge to build a technology stack that supports all of the IoT devices and applications. There will be hurdles in analytics i.e. number crunching at infinitely large scale.
Significant enhancement in cybersecurity is needed to mitigate the heightened risks. Overcoming organizational misalignment and regulatory hurdles will be another challenge.

Going forward, our work in digital transformation will require setting industry standards, common APIs, preparing IT systems and organizations for IoT, defining modular approaches for application design, updating operating models and security standards. We need to build a digital platform that integrates big data, IoT, social and mobile capabilities, mobility, user experience and cloud.
It’s should not be there to solve one problem only, it should be built with a long term view and vision such that it should be capable of not only solving today’s problems but potentially the problems that will come in the future and opportunities that can be captured in future. In today’s time, success is about being fast is delivering, being relevant and engaging customers in real time, offering service whenever & wherever that is personalized, dependable and 24/7.
Several bodies are working to address these questions like ITU’s Global Standards Initiative (IoT-GSI SG20), GSMA’s connected living program, IETF (6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE), AllSeen Alliance, IoT-A, IEEE (Project P2413), Open mobile alliance, Open Interconnect Consortium, Industrial Internet Consortium (founded by Intel, Cisco, AT&T, GE and IBM), newly formed Thread Group, Nest (Weave) and lastly Apple (HomeKit, not a standard but an exceptional proprietary framework).

We’re on our way, but there’s still a lot of work to do there.