By Kevin Turner, Program Director, Innovation Strategy, IBM Watson IoT Developer Ecosystem
Email Kevin Turner
Content provided by AspenCore and IBM
In today’s world, big and small businesses alike are gravitating towards the Internet of Things (IoT). It’s a rapidly growing area for many modern businesses, enabled by technological innovations around the cloud and analytics, cheap sensors, and a robust network infrastructure to enable connectivity on a revolutionary scale. The growing number of connected devices in the physical world results in a heightened circulation of data in the cloud, making customer experiences, business insights, and transformative business models capable of reshaping entire industries.
Generally put, the IoT promotes an increased level of awareness about the world around us — it’s a platform that monitors the reactions to the changing conditions that new information exposes us to. More than anything, it’s the up-and-coming frontier for businesses.
As for the IoT developers driving this transformation, they’re a breed of their own, covering many areas of expertise. During the day, they operate under titles such as software developer, software engineer, web developer, app developer, IT professional, data scientist, database admin, industrial designer, and CTO. After hours, IoT is simply a hobby for these makers, spanning across all disciplines. According to a 2015 survey from EDC, 78% of IoT developers create IoT solutions as their main source of income. Without a doubt, there are IoT developers working on building the next billion-dollar startup.
One expert in the ways of IoT is Kevin Turner, program director of innovation strategy for the IoT developer ecosystem at IBM. Responsible for building a system that can add value to a business, Turner is tuned into what makes IoT thrive, and where it’s headed.
A professional engineer by training, Turner specializes in the area of strategy and innovation, and is focused on how developers can best take advantage of the IoT.
“Suddenly this idea where anything can be instrumented and we can do it using a series of protocols and techniques that many would recognize as being freely available on the Internet is where the idea of the Internet of Things, the language, the words, really come from,” said Turner. “So the opportunity and the idea are significant if you think about all of the applications which have been delivered to date through the industry, and the many trillions of dollars’ worth of investment in building solutions that people use for their everyday business transactions.”
There’s no question about it — the IoT is enormously powerful. According to Turner, it can be beneficial to every system that’s already been written by adding in new contextual information to the existing interfaces. As for the future, the new generation of developers is being trained in multiple skill areas in order to fill the growing demand for connected solutions in the coming years.
One important change the IoT introduced is combining the physical and digital worlds. When concrete objects are combined with cognitive computing using intelligent systems such as IBM’s Watson, they create an understanding of how we’re interacting with one another at any given moment, and can even analyze how we’re feeling. “That is mostly the rationale behind IBM joining the idea of Watson and the IoT together,” said Turner. “Until something intelligent has happened, and you haven’t actually done anything of value other than connect devices and make a lot of information flow, it’s the doing something intelligent with the analytics beyond it — that’s actually where the real value comes in.”
Analysts project that by 2025, data from connected devices will yield insights, driving potential economic value of as much as $11 trillion. What’s more, 91% of business leaders in the electronics industry believe the IoT will reshape their organization’s brand identity.
But how are developers approaching IoT differently from traditional methodologies from the past? According to Turner, the nature of development is now about being equipped with a broad brush of skills across a range of areas. “I think IoT presents a real challenge because it’s multifaceted by definition of there being computing elements which are in locations and places, and use technologies, protocols, and standards that just aren’t what the vast majority of developers today would recognize or understand,” he said.
In other words, because IoT is about computing in the physical world, the constraints and the issues to be considered for a big part of the IoT solution aren’t the same as the normal considerations and constraints for the majority of today’s developers. Currently they predominantly work in the context of coding on a client system, using an integrated development environment, and then deploying into a server context for that application to run and provide its services to end users.
“IoT is very different because it has this element of a whole bunch of things physically out there in the world feeding you information, and someone somewhere has to make all of that computing capability work,” said Turner.
When it comes to the Watson IoT Platform, which is used to build IoT applications that learn from the physical world, Turner relates it to a huge Russian doll. According to Turner, the platform sparks the idea that other processing can occur as a process before you even get that information back into the platform.
“To where we started the real value of IoT is ultimately in the intelligence and the analytics that can be applied to the data,” said Turner. “And the reason that we apply the intelligence and the analytics is to give a better business outcome. It very much does come down to what you were interested to know about, and what you can therefore change and respond differently to as a consequence of having that knowledge.”
Overall, the IoT is a system of awareness. It gives you an insight as to what’s happening in the physical world in a way that facilitates smarter decision making and allows for better engagement to the consumers, while at the same time, optimizing the resources those consumers are interested in.
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