Today saw the first of two days at the Internet of Things World Forum in London (not to be confused with the event with the same title hosted by Cisco in Chicago earlier this year). Attendance was very high, though predominantly a corporate crowd – technology providers, IT companies, operators and investors. The vast majority of the smaller companies were so-called ‘horizontal enablers’ selling some form of IOT-related platform, middleware or gateway or other. Although much of the discussion was on innovation in individual segments (e.g. connected home, fitness, health etc.), the voice of the start-ups in this space has so far been missing.
Here are some of the main themes raised during the sessions, many of which should come as no surprise.
IoT is big business now, not tomorrow
Very few speakers resisted the temptation to mention the Gartner Hype Cycle or how many billions of devices will be connected or how many zettabytes of data will be produced. Indeed the same set of numbers from Gartner, Cisco and IDC cropped up many a time. However, one set of numbers that did stand out was an IDC estimate quoted by Steve Dunbar of Microsoft, which stated that the IoT market today (i.e. for 2014) is worth $2.29T, rising to 4.59T in 2018. Quite staggering indeed, though it is unclear how broad a range of economic activity this definition of IoT encompasses.
Don’t ignore organisational design
James Monighan of British Gas gave one of the few insights into the creation of an IoT-enabled consumer product. Hive Active Heating, and British Gas’ Smart Energy Homes and Connected Boilers originate from the company’s internal start-up, which embraced agile project development methods and organisation structures inspired by Eric Ries’ Lean Startup. This is an approach which is unsurprisingly more usually found in start-ups than in large utilities. This philosophy was key in rapidly developing the products, hiring the right people and remaining responsive to customer feedback, and in turn allowed the team to achieve development timescales and insights that would have been impossible within the existing British Gas structures.
Privacy and security are important
At some point or other, all speakers mentioned that security was important. All agreed that it had to be designed from the ground up, and not as an add-on, though Todd Greene from PubNub was the only one to suggest an approach to deal with it. More interesting, was perhaps the debate on privacy, with a wide range of views being expressed, ranging from the, ‘its quite simple – always ask the customer’s consent,’ through to ‘it’s a generational thing – people are willing to trade privacy for something of value’. The range of topics in this space is immense, from securing mission-critical industrial systems to regulating what happens when ‘things’ interact with social networks. Although some suggested that regulation will provide guidance, I suspect that the chaos that will emerge from the interaction of personal data from social networks with personal data that can be inferred from public sensor networks in our cities will create privacy issues and dilemmas at a rate that regulators will struggle to cope with.
Start Small, Think Big
All presenters were unanimous – the key benefits of Internet of Things comes from harnessing the data produced by things, combining with already-existing data, and acting upon it. Indeed, the closer the data is brought from the device towards the enterprise, the more valuable it becomes. Often this can create brand new business models that would otherwise not exist. However, there was also agreement that success was best approached by starting small – nudging companies towards more prosaic and tangible ambitions, such as reducing operational costs through pre-emptive maintenance and reducing waste, perhaps by harnessing the data that already exists in the organisation. Confidence in the technology brought through these small steps will allow for bigger steps towards the unknown.
And finally – Swarm behaviour
In a whirlwind presentation, Jeff Smith of Numerex touched on the notion that the combination of increasing intelligence into the node with mesh communication networks will result in swarm behaviour, some of which can be unpredictable or surprising. Such mesh networks are intrinsically redundant and self-healing, and can display complex emergent behaviour derived from intrinsically simple interactions between the nodes. Conceptually fascinating and certainly thought-provoking, though I will need to spend some time thinking about the implications and the opportunities.
So, this was Day One. Looking forward to what Day Two has to offer.