This audio was created using Microsoft Azure Speech Services
In my previous blog post, I discussed the four pillars of opportunity for IoT and the potential that IoT has for creating greater value over time through ongoing innovation.
Three megatrends have provoked a huge increase in energy demand and in turn, spurred the IoT revolution:
- Urbanization: By 2050, the world’s cities will be home to an additional 2.5 billion people.[1]
- Digitization: Another 50 billion devices and “things” will be connected to the internet within five years.[2]
- Industrialization: Industrial energy use will increase by at least 50% over the next 35 years.[3]
In addition to these ongoing worldwide changes, we know that traditional fuels for energy are unsustainable and harmful to the planet. At the same time, 1.3 billion people are living without electricity. All this adds up to an energy dilemma.
To address this, IoT is accelerating in the midst of many significant technology changes that we see as fuel for innovation, notably in five key areas: mobility, cloud, sensing, analytics and security.
Mobility. We all have a smart device. It makes communication pervasive. It makes the user-experience easy and rich. It allows for user recognition – the buildings, the machines can recognize us because of our mobile devices.
It is also creating a new millennial workforce of digital natives ready to leverage mobile devices in everything they do. Not just in personal life, but also in business and industry.
The cloud. The aggregation of data. The affordable and secure cloud. The sharing of data – for instance, utilities, facility managers, contractors, end users and manufacturers can all work at the same time using the same database to improve building efficiency. This was not possible before. And it also means that large companies can have specialists manage their facilities and assets remotely, from anywhere.
Pervasive sensing. The costs of sensors, both embedded and external to physical products, is at the core of technology value with IoT.
Analytics. Putting historical process data into context with new sensor data coming from things – combined with application development advancements – enables what we call a “next generation approach” to advanced analytics. Without advanced analytics, the data from IoT is just big data.
What’s more, these advanced analytics allow for a sophisticated approach to addressing anything from small incidents to complex sequencing of events to prevent facility shutdowns.
Cybersecurity. As we move to more standard, open IP-based industrial network connectivity and protocols, the need for cybersecurity is evident.
Innovation At Every Level makes it possible to harness the power and possibilities of the IoT revolution.
I will be speaking at NGP World of Connections on Tuesday December 6th at 4:00 p.m. PST. Please attend or stay tuned for the video recording to learn how harnessing IoT in a standardized approach unlocks the full business value and capabilities IoT can deliver.
[1] United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs
[2] Cisco
[3] International Energy Agency (IEA)
