The ability of the Internet to connect people, companies, and information has been the foundation for extraordinary innovation across the globe and in all walks of life. This innovation has enabled thousands of new business opportunities to bloom in ways that would have been impossible only a few decades ago.
The extension of this connectivity to “things” – intelligent, sensor-based, and wired to the internet – is poised to have a similar impact, and companies in a wide range of industries are making investments in the new hardware, software, and people skills needed to make this Internet of Things (IoT) a reality.
The opportunities for IoT innovation abound. The ability, for example, to optimize the angle of the blades of a wind turbine in real time, or identify and track the contents of a pallet of parts as it moves through the supply chain, will change the underlying operations of every industry and every individual in ways that are only now beginning to be understood.
The key to those changes is the data that these intelligent “things” are able to transmit. Sensors in a wind turbine can detect minute changes in the velocity and direction of the wind and turn the blades almost instantaneously. The status of a shipping pallet and its contents – including its location, the temperature of the rail car it’s in, and how many g-forces it was subjected to since the last report – can be used to identify a problem before the pallet is ever unloaded. In each case the potential value is obvious, and immediate: optimizing a turbine’s energy generation capacity or ensuring that a pallet arrives safe and sound are typical of the business cases that are moving companies into the IoT era.
But this kind of data collection and analysis is only the starting point of a much broader set of use cases for IoT that extend the usefulness of these intelligent things and their data to every corner of the business world. In addition to managing the intelligent devices themselves, IoT data can be used to trigger a wide array of secondary processes that can provide exceptional levels of efficiency and customer service in ways that were simply not possible before.
The extension of this connectivity to “things” – intelligent, sensor-based, and wired to the internet – is poised to have a similar impact, and companies in a wide range of industries are making investments in the new hardware, software, and people skills needed to make this Internet of Things (IoT) a reality.
The opportunities for IoT innovation abound. The ability, for example, to optimize the angle of the blades of a wind turbine in real time, or identify and track the contents of a pallet of parts as it moves through the supply chain, will change the underlying operations of every industry and every individual in ways that are only now beginning to be understood.
The key to those changes is the data that these intelligent “things” are able to transmit. Sensors in a wind turbine can detect minute changes in the velocity and direction of the wind and turn the blades almost instantaneously. The status of a shipping pallet and its contents – including its location, the temperature of the rail car it’s in, and how many g-forces it was subjected to since the last report – can be used to identify a problem before the pallet is ever unloaded. In each case the potential value is obvious, and immediate: optimizing a turbine’s energy generation capacity or ensuring that a pallet arrives safe and sound are typical of the business cases that are moving companies into the IoT era.
But this kind of data collection and analysis is only the starting point of a much broader set of use cases for IoT that extend the usefulness of these intelligent things and their data to every corner of the business world. In addition to managing the intelligent devices themselves, IoT data can be used to trigger a wide array of secondary processes that can provide exceptional levels of efficiency and customer service in ways that were simply not possible before.
