Microsoft are making great progress in bringing the Internet of Things (IOT) to real world, everyday businesses. Not just for large enterprises with the resources to invest in expensive appliances but for any organisation who has monitoring devices feeding data in real time that needs real time analytics and decisions.

Microsoft can democratise it because they are delivering a number of services on Azure that can be glued together as needed to create IOT solutions. And because it is on Azure there is no hefty upfront investment in hardware and software licences and instead organisations pay for what they need as they need it.

I was recently at a seminar where participants were asked to gaze into their crystal ball and predict four of the big changes ahead. It was surprising how many of us called out the Internet of Things as one of the four. It was interesting to then architect a real time analytics solution for a client that had streaming data from devices that needed to be analysed and reconfigured in real time.

This gave me the opportunity to sit down with pretty forward looking people at Microsoft and work out how we could do this on Azure. The surprising thing to me was that all the componentry I needed was there, albeit that some of it won't come out of public preview probably until later this year. But that’s not surprising when it is such a newly emerging technology. The pleasing aspect is that they are not recasting old tools to do new tricks; these are components built from the ground up specifically to address the needs of IOT.

In brief, without going into a deep dive on the technology, it is possible to capture millions of events streaming from devices, push them through analytics tools that can identify if any immediate actions are required and if they are then send instructions back to the same or different devices to change their behaviour in some way and then store all the messages for more traditional analytics and reporting later on. Devices controlling devices sounds a bit like futuristic robotics; but it is landing now. The fact that it is happening in the cloud just makes it sound more surreal, until you remember that the cloud is just someone else’s very big, secure data centre.

I have been told that one of these Azure services is currently processing on a daily basis 81 billion events, adding up to over 60 terabytes of data. Suddenly that is not some R&D project; this is real world business.

It is also interesting to think about who needs IOT. The obvious use case is utilities with smart meters. But there are case studies on how it can be used in hospitals to monitor patients in real time. It doesn’t have to be about millions of devices. It is about the business need. An organisation with a few hundred or thousand monitoring devices still has the same needs as a utility company. With the cloud, size doesn’t matter. And because you pay for what you need, the cloud, and in this case Azure, makes IOT available and affordable irrespective of the organisation’s size.

SysTalk is a solution integrator that specialises in data integration and analytics and the next big thing in data integration and analytics is IOT; we are looking forward to using it to improve the business of our clients. www.systalk.com.au