Hobbs suggests that in addition to adding new abilities to pre-existing companies, the IoT will spawn new types of companies based purely on the innovation it will encourage. Already IoT technologies are finding their way into places where previously technology wasn’t cost effective to deploy.
Technology costs
“Sensor technology is dropping in cost, making it practical to deploy sensors where previously it would have been a bit irrational to do so,” said Robert Jones, founder of barcode and identification technology specialist Vision ID.
The price of technology like RFID tags is dropping steadily because demand for them is growing, fuelling economies of scale for manufacturers. As a result, they’re starting to show up in new and innovative places.
During the seven-year history of our report, the average tolerance level for organisation’s obsolete devices in their networks has been around 10%. Rarely do organisations allow this to increase beyond 11% before they refresh the relevant devices. The conventional assumption was that an overall technology refresh was imminent but our data shows that organisations are refreshing mostly obsolete devices, Andre van Schalkwyk, Dimension Data
“If you go into any Marks and Spencer’s clothing department and look at the higher value goods there, you’ll find they all have RFID tags on them. That gives the store managers real time information on sales and also on thefts. We’ve also come across a retailer that is trialling the use of robots that drive around at night when the store is closed reading the tags and doing real time stock checking,” said Jones.
According to Vision ID, the core components used to deploy IoT technologies are not particularly new. Many, such as core sensors and RFID are established and proven technologies, as are the big data and cloud components that brings the concept together.
“The reading and sensing technology has been there for a long time but it’s coming together now in a really interesting way,” he said
Three phase deployment
VisionID uses a three phase methodology to roll out its IoT technologies – Sense, Analyse and Act.
“The first is the means by which the technology interacts with the real world. Sensors are used to proactively return information, be located, read from or whatever is appropriate to the use case. The information they generate is analysed and that’s where complementary ideas from big data and cloud computing come in,” he said.
“The last is Act, so something physically happens based on this data gathering and analysis. If we look at the applications we’ve done, these three phases generally result in some repetitive manual task being eliminated or automated. Where someone used to have to get physically involved in gathering information from a machine or getting an update on a production sequence, that has been replaced with a system that gives managers real time availability of information.”
By way of an example, Jones points to a private medical clinic in Galway that is a client of Vision ID. When they arrive for treatment, patients at this clinic are given a wrist band with an embedded RFID chip that remains with them for the duration of their stay.
“Their chart and medical information effectively follows them around rather than being recorded somewhere else. The clinic can get real time information on where a patient is in terms of the stage of treatment they are at. Based on that, they can prepare the next step in the chain,” he said.
“By physically having the sensor on their wrist, it’s all automatically done without having to get people involved.”
Observer concern
As sensor costs drop and IoT sophistication continues to evolve, there seems little doubt that more and more new applications for these technologies will appear. And yet it is just this potential for explosive change that is starting to concern some observers.
Earlier this year Dimension Data released its Network Barometer report, which found that 74% of the average organisation in the UK and Ireland’s mobile devices are still too old to support advanced enterprise mobility requirements. In addition, the majority of network devices are not yet internet protocol version six (IPv6) capable and in fact only 21% support IPv6.
Taken together, the report’s authors suggest that these factors point to many organisations not giving the Internet of Things, enterprise mobility, and collaboration via the network, sufficient strategic focus.
“The Internet of Things will see an increasing number and variety of business-enabling and enhancing technologies interconnecting via networks. Non-human objects will be able to gather data from their environment, interact with one another, and make intelligent decisions, all without human intervention,” said Andre van Schalkwyk, consulting practice manager for Dimension Data’s networking business unit.
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