 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific III 2013 |
| Article no.: | 10 | |
| Topic: | Doing Business with the Internet of Things | |
| Author: | Alan Perkins | |
| Title: | CTO, Asia Pacific | |
| Organisation: | Rackspace | |
| PDF size: | 203KB |
About author
Alan Perkins is Rackspace’s Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific.
Based in Sydney, he is responsible for driving continued growth and technological innovation in the region.
Prior to Rackspace, Mr Perkins spent more than ten years at Altium, in key leadership and specialist consulting roles, including seven years as CIO. During his tenure at Altium, he played a pivotal role preparing and implementing strategies to move the entire business systems to the cloud. In 2009, Alan Perkins was a finalist for the IDC Asia Pacific CIO of the Year Award. In the same year he won an Enterprise Innovation Award for Cloud Innovation from IDC. ‘The Australian’ named him as one of the Top 20 people to watch in technology, in 2012.
Alan Perkins holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Tasmania – graduated 1986. He is a Chartered Accountant and Member Australian Institute of Company Directors (MAICD
Article abstract
We have come a long way since computers started changing the way we work and interact. The whole concept of who, or what, is communicating with whom is radically changing, where sensor networks, fixed or mobile, can provide incremental knowledge that is assembled somewhere in the Cloud, and provides more intuitive way of living, doing business or taking care of our health. Such a wealth of new facilities depends on the ability of billions of communicators to access the Internet – an Internet of IPv6 Things!
Full Article
Cisco and Intel have been talking for several years now about how the number of connected devices on the Internet will increase threefold, to around 15Billion by 2015. Depending on who you ask, forecasts for the year 2020 put the number somewhere between 30Billion and 50Billion.When you consider the sheer number of individual sensors capturing information, these numbers are very conservative – with sensors collecting data, these numbers run into the trillions. It is clear that IPv4 as an Internet Protocol never anticipated this scale of connectivity. IPv6, on the other hand, enables us to not only use devices to consume information, but to place devices into the Internet community, as fully functioning interactive members.
A number of technologies are starting to converge, putting almost every business in a situation where they will need to understand what impact the Machine to Machine landscape will have on their business and what opportunities it all represents.
The advent of computers
When computers were first introduced to the workforce, people were required to adjust their work practices to the needs of the computer. Computers became the central force – the object around which all information revolved. A team of specialists would operate the computer, and procedures and paperwork changed to support the computer. As technologies improved the computer became more accessible, and access became more direct and decentralised. Computers have evolved and taken on more significance in our work practices, but office procedures and processes still reflect the humble beginnings where everything revolved around the rigid needs of the Big Machine.
Web 2.0 and the empowered workforce
The interactive Web, mobile computing, and social media principles in particular, are actually enabling us now to reintroduce more natural work practices – practices based upon our abilities to connect directly, rendering computers into the background. Under this model, individuals more naturally publish information, news, status updates and their sense of the world around them, for anyone who has the permission and interest to subscribe.
Business processes are increasingly taking advantage of this paradigm. Without losing their importance, computers and related devices are becoming less visible in the work practices , more naturally disappearing into the background as people focus more on the objectives they wish to achieve and less on the technology used to achieve them.
A number of business applications are taking advantage of this approach, particularly in areas involving collaboration to achieve goals. Customer relationship management, project management, sales management, credit management and human resources management are just some areas where collaborative approaches are changing the way we do business. For example, tools like Assembla and Pivotal Tracker provide agile publisher/subscriber models for project management. They enable large teams to access information at the level of granularity they need when they need it. Information overload is solved by defining rules about what events or non-events need to be escalated. To illustrate, a project manager can ask to be notified if an estimated due date slips on a critical path. A non-event might be the failure of a person to perform an action item within a predetermined timeframe.
Tools like Salesforce Chatter provide the ability for business objects to talk directly to subscribers. For example, a sales manager may wish to be alerted if any details of a sales opportunity change, such as the expected close date, the amount involved or the probability of success. Next generations of tools like this are likely to enable subscriptions based on business rules and patterns – a sales manager being able to subscribe to any opportunity in his or her organisation that meets certain criteria, for example where the amount involved is more than two standard deviations above the previous quarter’s median, or where the opportunity is for a certain combination of products, or the customer is a designated strategic account.
The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things will enable us to build further on this and allow devices to communicate with humans, other devices and systems to facilitate new workflows and business models. It is fair to say that our daily lives will be impacted in many ways, some subtle, some profound.
Devices that have been designed for widely different purposes will be able to subscribe to each other, in order to make our lives better. For instance, a car’s GPS can send information into the Cloud, where some agent software will be able to ascertain the driver’s intent and act accordingly. For instance, if it determines the car is heading back home, it could check to see whether the heater or air conditioner should be turned on. Or if the car, based on the driver’s calendar and GPS, is heading to the office, the driver’s executive assistant or supervisor could be notified of the expected time of arrival, based on current traffic conditions.
Likewise, an alarm clock could receive information from an airport’s systems letting an impending passenger get an extra ten minutes sleep if their plane is running late. A rubbish bin could identify a disposed product wrapper and add a new packet to the shopping list.
Sensors capturing all sorts of data will change business practices. Already jet engine manufactures are moving into a thrust-as-a-service model: instead of selling engines to aircraft manufacturers, some are opting to charge on the amount of thrust produced. Airlines can thus put on additional capacity without large capital expenditure, effectively enabling them to grow more quickly because they don’t have to risk their investment capital in speculative fixed assets. This is a genuine application of Cloud concepts to general business principles.
Sensors are enabling the elderly to live more independently. Diabetic monitoring equipment, pacemakers and other medical equipment will increasingly provide real time information about a person’s current state of health. Tying in a pacemaker to a car system will eventually lead to cars that will pull over and notify the nearest medical emergency services that the driver is showing early signs of a heart attack. Wearable mobile devices can detect a collapse, activate on voice, and broadcast to a number of close family members simultaneously that something has gone wrong. This example is currently being developed in Australia by the recent winner of Rackspace’s Small Team Big Impact competition for start-ups, Ollo Mobile.
Sensors will ultimately enable vehicles to drive themselves. Car sensors will also enable motor vehicle manufacturers to understand what causes certain car systems to fail, reducing the number of factory recalls. Anonymised data from car sensors will help in town planning with the placement of roads, traffic lights, hospitals and schools.
A number of technologies are converging to enable us to benefit from this new world of connected devices. Our capacity to process the explosion of data being stored has kept apace by using new techniques that split workloads across multiple computers. The cost of storing all the data has dramatically reduced – for instance, the first hard disk drive was released in 1956. It was five megabytes and cost $435,000 in today’s terms. A four-terabyte drive built using that technology would cost $350Billion and take up a floor area of 1600km2. NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Redis are enabling businesses to process semi-structured and unstructured data, allowing us to capture additional information going forward without compromising the information we have captured historically.
IPv6 will easily provide enough unique addresses for every sensor on the planet. This will enable bilateral interactivity between devices where decisions could be automatically made to take advantage of the data coming from, and the decisions made by other devices.
Devices and sensors will take advantage of artificial intelligence. They will need to learn how much influence other devices around them are allowed to have on their behaviour. For example a car needs to be able to tell other nearby cars where it is and where it will be in the next few seconds, but the ultimate intention of the journey and who are the passengers on board should not be available. That is unless there is some other context that allows that information to be shared, for instance two cars travelling together.
One of the challenges here is the sheer number of devices and identifying ways in which all the devices can be located quickly. Many devices will be mobile. We have solved this with mobile phones, but the number of devices is on a scale something like four orders of magnitude higher. What is required is a multi-tiered indexing global referencing system that enables devices to register their location so they can be easily found in real time.
Notwithstanding some of the challenges, businesses need to start thinking about how they can take advantage of connecting devices for better customer experiences, targeted marketing and workflow improvements. For example advertisers could potentially use cameras to identify the gender and approximate age and weight of a passer-by and display demographically appropriate information on a screen.
Businesses that can take advantage of the interconnectivity of people, devices and information will be the ones making the best decisions, offering the most effective and innovative products and building the platforms that will form the foundations for life in the next thirty to fifty years.
