IOT - Machine meets World.
I have news for you. We will all not be virtualised in a virtual memory of a virtual machine somewhere in the virtual cloud.
A sigh of relief! and rightly so after constantly being inundated with the latest buzz words that’d have us believe that anytime now our brains will be upload in the metaverse. No we are not there yet conversely we can’t say the same to a machine which perhaps rather not get involved in our sweaty, bloody and dusty world of physical beings that we take for granted. The interface that a computer, AI or otherwise would use to the physical world is what Internet-Of-Things is all about. IOT for the most part are the ears, eyes, nose and sensations of a computer program, much like our own five senses, and this is precisely what Kevin Ashton meant when he coined the term, whilst linking the Proctor & Gamble supply chain to the Internet and I quote “In the twentieth century, computers were brains without senses – they only knew what we told them.”
Although I would say that we did have industrial automation before the advent of internet however it wasn’t wide spread across verticals as we see today and years to come.
Notable from the chart in figure1 apart from a wide array of industries that are deploying IOT devices is the dominance of the consumer sector IOT which manifests as the mobile phone being the conduits for applications like health & fitness monitors and other wearable IOT devices, sending consumer sensor data to cloud hosted application for further analysis and action. The cloud hosted application increasingly utilising big data, machine learning and Artificial intelligence are the ultimate consumers of the vast amount of data collected by IOT devices.
Figure 2.
The Utilities sector in general represented by Electricity, Gas, Steam A/C, Water supply and Waste management verticals and the manufacturing as well as the Transportation sectors though have seen their genesis in the IOTesque environment in the so called industry 3.0 evolution of automation even before the advent of internet in the shape of sensor data ranging from water level, chemical composition, temperature, particulate concentration, electric load and the relevant response/actuation function i.e. shutting the oil flow due to pressure input from sensor data, or breaking a circuit in the grid upon sensing current overload. We are now witnessing and likely see the acceleration in evolution from legacy Industry 3.0 Closed Network SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data acquisition) to an industry 4.0 framework based an open Internet integrated network.
The chart in figure 2 depicts the migration from legacy closed network SCADA to IOT centric paradigm.
Although the legacy infrastructure in the Electricity, GAS, Steam & AC sector is slow to migrate to an IOT infrastructure due to the mission critical nature of control for example Electricity Grids with relays and switch control that rely heavily on legacy SCADA networks for telemetry and control of the grid, the higher uptake of IOT devices in this sector is also indicative of new Green Energy power plants that are coming online at an ever increasing pace in the form of Wind Turbines and Solar fields that from the get go are provisioned with an IOT based Supervisory control and telemetry system.
That’s all well and good, machines are getting their all-encompassing senses at an increasing pace but “show me the money” I hear you say.
Figure 3.
Figure 4.
The IOT market globally is forecast to grow at around $50 Billion per year. Looking at figure 1, one would be forgiven to think that most of the revenue would be generated from the consumer IOT segment, simply because a lot of the growth in the consumer segment is related to home automation and mobile devices. Despite not being in the top 3 of the sectors in terms of number of IOT devices deployed the Government are now and forecast to be the 3rd if not the 2nd biggest contributor to revenue generation in the IOT market now and in the years to come, most of the Government IOT spend is around Smart City & Defence and will gave way to Consumer vertical towards the end of the current decade.
The scale of growth of both IOT devices and revenue generated is forecasted as linear in the next ten years, beyond that we could only imagine how widely pervasive the eyes and ears (IOT) of an increasingly AI dominated world would be and this simple linear relationship might need to be a logarithmic one to depict the exponential uptake of and IOT and AI in the decades to come.
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