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August 4, 2015
The IOT Monetization Problem
July 28, 2015
The Windows 10 Hardware Argument
July 21, 2015
The Complexity Challenge Drives Shadow IT
July 14, 2015
The Hidden Opportunity of Corporate Smartphones
July 7, 2015
The Analytics of IOT
June 30, 2015
IOT Momentum Starting to Build
June 23, 2015
Breaking the IOT Connection
June 16, 2015
Software is a Service
June 9, 2015
The Challenge of Rising Expectations
June 4, 2015
Insider Extra: Rethinking the Conference Room
June 2, 2015
Win10 + Intel Skylake + Thunderbolt 3 = Interesting PC
May 26, 2015
The IOT Opportunity is Wide Open
May 21, 2015
Insider Extra: The Carrier Challenge for Consumer IOT
May 19, 2015
Maker Movement Drives the Future
May 14, 2015
Insider Extra: The Next Step for Wearables: Health Care
May 12, 2015
Making Sense of IOT
May 5, 2015
A Fresh Look at Wearables
April 30, 2015
Insider Extra: The Amazing HoloLens Leap
April 28, 2015
The Device Dream Team: Large Smartphones and Thin Notebooks
April 23, 2015
Insider Extra: Mobile Sites Should Be Dead
April 21, 2015
Wearables + Connected Cars = IOT Heaven
April 14, 2015
The Future of Wearable Power Is Energy Harvesting
April 7, 2015
Twinning Is Key to Connected Devices
April 2, 2015
Insider Extra: Competing Standard Co-Existence For Wireless Charging and IOT
March 31, 2015
Riding the High-Res Tidal Wave
March 24, 2015
Smart Cars Accelerating Slowly
March 19, 2015
Insider Extra: The Future of Computing is Invisible
March 17, 2015
Smart Home Decade Dilemma
March 10, 2015
Apple Event Surprises
March 3, 2015
Flat Slab Finale?
February 26, 2015
Insider Extra: "Phablet" Impact Continues to Grow
February 24, 2015
Paying for Digital Privacy
February 19, 2015
Insider Extra: The Wire-Free PC
February 17, 2015
Whither Apple?
February 12, 2015
Insider Extra: The Real IOT Opportunity? Industry
February 10, 2015
Business Models For The Internet of Things (IOT)
February 5, 2015
Insider Extra: Is "Mobile Only" The Future?
February 3, 2015
Sexiest New Devices? PCs...
January 29, 2015
Insider Extra: iPhone Next
January 27, 2015
How Will Windows 10 Impact PCs and Tablets?
January 22, 2015
Insider Extra: Hands-On (or Heads-on) With HoloLens
January 20, 2015
Whither Windows 10?
January 15, 2015
Insider Extra: Mobile Security: The Key to a Successful BYOD Implementation
January 13, 2015
Smart Home Situation Likely To Get Worse Before It Gets Better
January 6, 2015
More Tech Predictions for 2015
December 30, 2014
Top 5 Tech Predictions for 2015
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August 18, 2015
By Bob O'Donnell
To achieve the full IOT vision that many companies like to espouse, you would need to seemingly connect everything to everything. Realistically, of course, that’s not only impossible, it’s actually of questionable practical value. While we may occasionally hear about surprising new combinations of devices and connections, most of the odd combinations won’t do anything useful.
Instead, the focus in the near term is more likely to be about connecting related devices to each other: lights to lights, heating and air conditioning systems to thermostats, wearables to smart phones, and so on. Applying this concept practically to the business world—where many of the most useful and most profitable applications are likely to be found—we’re starting to see a lot of interesting vertical applications for IOT.
Smart buildings, for example, are starting to combine all the core “infrastructure” elements of buildings from lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning), security, plumbing, electrical, and so on into integrated systems that can be connected, monitored, and controlled from a single source. It’s analogous to the way independent elements of a modern data center—servers, storage, and networking—are all starting to be combined into hyper-converged infrastructure appliances which are under the control of a single management interface.
However, even making these simple types of connections isn’t always as easy as it sounds. In the case of smart buildings, many of these “infrastructure systems” have always been independent of each other and don’t really have a common point of connection. That’s part of the reason we’re starting to see companies like Dell and others start to offer smart building “gateway” devices that potentially connect to some (though not all) of these systems.
But having a gateway isn’t enough. There are also challenges in determining how the systems might connect from a software perspective. While there are some old serial port physical connectors that can be leveraged, these are truly “legacy” systems that don’t always adhere to modern standards. Some buildings leverage BACnet, which is a specific smart building industry protocol used in building automation systems (BAS), but there can be many variations.
As a result, it can be challenging to piece together comprehensive solutions…and that’s just intra-building. If we want to move onto smart cities, we would need buildings to talk to each other and, potentially, to city-wide grids of intelligence and capability. While efforts are certainly being made there, they’re likely to be much further off from implementation than some of the IOT hype seems to suggest.
Once again, there’s a real lack of platforms available to drive the kinds of connections and applications that are potentially possible in most of these vertical industries. Throw in smart cars, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) connections, and you have an absurdly complex array of communications that needs to be sorted out before even the simplest of IOT visions comes to pass.
This is why discussions around IOT standards are very important on one level, but on another level are not. The issue is that there’s a great deal of work that needs to be done on solving the vertical industry challenges before we can start to worry about making vertical industry-to-vertical industry connections. Yet, that’s where a lot of the discussions around protocol standards battles, such as AllJoyn vs. OIC, are being focused.
In truth, some of the inter-industry work can be done simultaneously to the vertical intra-industry efforts, but how are we going to get, for example, smart shipping containers to also co-exist with smart buildings, when each of these solutions has a great deal of work to do within its own industry?
Additionally, these aren’t exactly the sexiest, coolest concepts for IOT. As a result, they may not get as much focused attention as some of the snazzier IOT concepts, such as consumer-focused smart homes.
Now, it could be that some of the current standards end up becoming the driving factor in vertical industries. The problem is, for example, we could see AllJoyn take hold in smart cars, while OIC wins out in smart buildings, etc. Then we’ll end up facing the need for protocols to talk to each other as these industries start to try and work together.
Eventually, we will probably see the kind of vertical industry platforms connections to vertical industry platform connections that the grand IOT visions promise. In the meantime, however, we’d be much better off just getting the closely-related vertical industry solutions working well before worrying much about where else they can connect.
Here's a link to the original column: https://techpinions.com/building-vertical-platforms-for-iot/41480
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