IoT Primer – an Appetizer at the Happy Hour

In conversations with family and friends, I have come to realize the benefit for broader audience in explaining some foundational concepts on “Internet of Things” (IoT), before delving any deeper. So, this appetizer is for the IoT starters. IoT Ninjas: while this one may not appeal to your taste, upcoming servings will do. Stay tuned.

Internet of Things, as you may have heard, is about connecting “things” to a central entity to gather data and extract insights for actions. There are several concepts, some simple and some complex, hidden in that definition.

First, the connection of things in IoT implies the connecting of two worlds, physical and digital, that have been traditionally disconnected. Ha…sounds like a cliché again. Right? Well, in simple words, it means connecting tangible physical things that were hitherto not instrumented to generate data and/or to receive feedback insights. That is, the “things” in IoT are primarily not the computers, laptops, tablets, smart phones, or other items that were born digital, but rather are items that were first born physical and now have use cases to turn them into digital: daily items we see at home such as thermostats, A/C machines, washers, dryers, toasters and other kitchenware, watches and other wearables, water fixtures, toilets, etc. The list is endless (of course, it is a separate discussion as to the value of connecting a physical entity to the digital world and the willingness of consumer to pay for insights and recommended actions). More than the consumer world, the real impact with IoT is already being realized in the industrial and commercial worlds. Most of the physical things in the manufacturing, mining, oil & gas, and other heavy industries are mechanical or electrical components or a combination of both; same with physical things in city and transportation infrastructure, utilities, and other public/commercial sectors. Rarely were these items invented and instrumented for data. Now being made possible with emerging technologies, harnessing data from these things will elevate one or more of safety, reliability, security, productivity, efficiency, and optimization for an individual and/or enterprise and/or the society as a whole. More on that later.

Now, what makes an IoT solution complete? Connect things, Collect data, Compute analytics, Consume insights and/or Command systems, Control things, and Commercialize solution. The first mile (Connect) is paramount for IoT and the last Mile (control) augments IoT. Without these two, it becomes a traditional data & analytics play. On the other hand, without the data & analytics pieces, connecting things does not hold much value. That is, for IoT data is the blood, connection and collection is the heart, and the analytics is the brain. All pieces have to come together to make the IoT solution meaningful.

So, what does connecting things to a central entity mean? For simplicity sake, there are two primary variations:

1. Connect multiple sensor devices deployed at a facility to a central computing node (referred to as Edge in IoT parlance) that is still local to the facility. For example, an instrumented light bulb most likely will not have computing infrastructure and so will transmit data to an Edge node in the building. The Edge can collect data from all such light bulbs, compute analytics for insights, and send commands back to light bulb (or its controller).
2. Connect more complex things to a much larger central computing entity such as a cloud platform or a data center. In this case, the “complex thing” can be a combination of sensor, edge, and gateway software, all three embedded into one device such as smart thermostat. Or it can be a combination of edge and gateway software in one device, while several sensors are deployed separately across a large facility. In that case, on one side the edge talks to the multiple sensors that do not have native connectivity to the cloud directly (as in above # 1), and the gateway talks to the cloud on the other side.

Another distinction to note in IoT is the approach in computing analytics for insights. It is an alloy of operations technology (OT) computing paradigm supported by the information technology (IT) systems. IoT is primarily about extracting insights from thing data and acting on those insights before the value diminishes rapidly in time. So, primary focus of IoT is (near) real-time operations in manufacturing plants, buildings, utilities, physical infrastructure, etc. The analytics requires the compute footprint and configuration to handle in runtime (hundreds of) millions of data events per second generated by millions of connected things.

Stay tuned for more discussion about the IoT Connect and Compute Platforms, and their on-going evolution for greater business value.