What is the transformation happening in the Internet of Thing? Business processes and networks will no longer be powered by people, but by equipment connected through IoT. Cloud computing enables the creation of simpler and cheaper devices, with all the intelligence processed in the cloud. Big data tools, often open sourced, enable the processing of massive amounts of data captured by the devices and will play a crucial role in the space.
Beyond consumer, B2B enterprise vertical applications of the Industrial Internet of Things, fueled in part by robotics, hold considerable promise in a number of areas such as manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, retail and energy. Some of clearest revenue opportunities for IoT startups are in the enterprise area.
The Industrial Internet of Things requires multiprotocol, multimedia platforms able to perform control networking using IP all the way to the end device. Successful industrial control networking solutions will recognize and embrace the special considerations of the industrial world,
The Industrial Internet Consortium like AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel will cooperate to create engineering standards to connect objects, sensors and large computing systems in some of the world’s largest industrial assets, like oil refineries, factories or harbors.
This consortium hopes to establish common ways that machines share information and move data. Creating standards for things like the electricity levels within small machines, or the kinds of radio technology a railroad might use to signal track conditions, can increase the size of the potential market and speed product development.
Market researchers such as IHS predict that in just a few years, the Industrial Internet of things will surpass the Consumer Internet of Things in scope and economic value, assuming certain conditions are met. Just as the flourishing of the Internet depended on bridging the disparate networks connecting PCs of the 1980s, so too the flourishing of the Industrial Internet of Things depends on the industrial-device networks’ ability to intercommunicate, even in the face of incompatible protocols and connectivity media. As with the Internet, the bridging protocol can be IP: the Internet Protocol.
As recently as last August, Gartner analysts positioned the Internet of Things at the “peak of inflated expectations”.
New concepts and systems are being developed to support the notion that machines could be intuitive enough to process user intent rather than just instruction. However, progress in interface technologies does not seem to be enabling those notions, so more innovation is needed to see them through.