The European Commission simply describes the IoT “as merging physical and virtual worlds, creating smart environments”. What is its potential in the years ahead? Gartner predicts there will be 20.4 billion internet-connected “things” in use by 2020; 2.6 for every person on earth, outnumber humans by the end of the year.
We normally experience the internet in human-to-device connections via WiFi, Bluetooth, connected to our phones, laptops, smart watches, fitness trackers, videos, cars, temperature sensors, etc, devices connected to the internet and able to "talk" to one another. The escalating size of the IoT mirrors the fastest economic growth experienced in the history of human civilisation.
Forrester Research predicts that “the IoT will become the backbone of future customer value; the IoT infrastructure will shift to the edge and to specialised IoT platforms; developers will have a significant impact on platforms and initiatives, and security will remain a key concern”.
New European guidelines will give the green light for commercialising IoT data to encourage the use of advanced technology and incentive the data economy.
Marketers will take advantage of the IoT opportunity; devices will open marketers’ minds to new ways of interacting with customers ( e.g. wearables) building more intimate brand experience.
In the years to come, there’ll be a spike in deployment of Edge IoT, a device that enables a local user to connect and transfer data to a network that is external or is non-propriety to the organization/user, that take advantage of the cloud for security, scalability, configuration, deployment, and management. Hyper-scale cloud providers including will extend their geographic reach in the coming years, observing compliance with strict regulatory environment laws.
IoT platform providers will begin to specialise in orchestrating operation scenarios and for software design, that integrates their different set of IoT, platforms built for their needs. More enterprises will push processing and analysis of data to the edge of the network, in order to cut data consumptions costs and reduce network inactivity.
Developers will pursue accelerated device integration via public cloud IoT platform services. searching for more integrated approaches to creating, delivering and servicing their wares to customers. The new integrated IoT technology will have the potential to tie them up.
IoT strong security controls will be at the centre of prevalent-widespread- damaging cyber attacks; security and privacy are in risk, because our digital systems are vulnerable, as hackers seek to compromise systems to extract sensitive data from our hardware and software IoT devices.
Promising pilot projects are beginning to emerge, and the advancement of IoT and Blockchain technologies and products will drive a steady adoption of both technologies in the near future.
Prototype supermarkets are stores where customers can walk in, take an item off the shelf after scanning it with their smartphones and be charged for it without having to go through the checkout, will be everywhere in the next five years, as Amazon did in some cities in the USA.
Trends in IoT automation are being investigated, particularly intelligent sensors; the challenge is in connecting different systems. Projections are provided for the total market through 2022.
IoT systems are a great fit with greenfield manufacturing plants. Integrating these solutions into existing facilities promises major returns, as manufacturers need to deploy a complex infrastructure and count on employees who understand the rapidly evolving IoT changes.
IoT practices will be applied to find the solution to high costs and emerging standards.
A new generation of Intelligent Internet of Things (IIoT), is being created to gain more effective insight into real-time operations. This change will impact the business in many ways.
Big Data and Analytics are now and will be, at the heart of the IoT movement, because of the insights you are able to achieve your business.
A collaborative approach to your IoT platform is re-shaping how businesses are organised, including the roles and responsibilities of individuals — and how they work together.
To summarise, we will see a growing number of consumer-facing connected products that use connectivity to solve real problems, customer engagement via mobile and wearables; investment in artificial intelligence will triple, as firms look to tap complex systems; advanced analytics and machine learning technology will be more sophisticated, but at the same time, organisations will find the form to integrate them with the existing human expertise.
Dave Food