Showcased Innovations at IoT Evolution Expo

I spent much of last week in Las Vegas at IoT Evolution. There were several use cases presented that showcased some of the cool innovation going on in IoT.

Some of the use cases that stood out to me include:

• The Weather Company, recently acquired by IBM, has 250,000 weather forecasters worldwide who put sensors in their back yards and upload data to TWC’s cloud approximately every 9 minutes every day. This is how you and I are able to get accurate, real time weather forecasts on our mobile devices.
• The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company monitors its tires all over the planet to get information about how operators drive and maintain their vehicles.  This data is also used as a training tool for drivers to learn how to drive better so that wear and tear on tires and everything else is minimized.

While IoT is really changing the way we interact with the world around us, we also learned that we have a very long way to go before there is widespread monetization of IoT.

In that Goodyear example, we learned that the truck operators in a mine had removed the gateways from their trucks because they were bulky and a hassle to use.

Despite all the buzz around IoT analytics, big data, etc., few companies have actually been able to harness this data and use it enterprise-wide to create value for either themselves or their customers.

While the “T” in IoT stands for “Things”, most companies that manufacture things are still struggling to connect them to the cloud and get value out of that connectivity.  These are the same problems that early M2M adopters faced:

• Internal organizational resistance to change
• Resistance to using 3^rd party technology (though this is getting better)
• Customer resistance, both from the business as well as IT
• Identifying value propositions around connectivity that create measurable economic benefits

In order to be successful, companies that provide IoT cloud-based solutions need to work with their customers to address and resolve these and other challenges; otherwise deployments will be light and scattered and will not provide optimal value.