I plugged my iPhone into my new (fuel-emission friendly) VW this week and - for the first time - my car was connected to by digital life. Siri (finally) came alive and started sending my contacts voice to text messages, my favorite Spotify soundtrack was arranging itself in all its glory on my vehicle dashboard, and I didn't have to worry about tuning radio stations, pairing devices that barely talked to each other, or getting stuck using some horrible proprietary technology my previous car had forced me to use, or those awful attempts at being "appy" from the cable TV providers that look nice, but require months of frustration to figure out.
My car was finally seamlessly connected with my personal apps that run my life, and my suicidal urge to text and drive has been cured by Siri finally doing it for me! While it's been pretty cool to program the air-con using a mobile app or have automated replenishment of new coffee capsules... being able to take your digital life into your moving vehicle is what IoT is all about. It's high-time to get past the buzz about IoT being bigger than IT itself - it's really about sensors, data and most importantly what we can do with this data, and how we can create digital experiences outside of our traditional mobile and laptop screens.
So, without further ado, let's take a look at the 2017 landscape for IoT service providers and have a chat with report co-author and manufacturing-engineering analyst guru himself, Pareekh Jain, about the emerging landscape for IoT services...
Phil Fersht, Chief Analyst and CEO, HfS: Pareekh, how do you see the IoT market evolving and what are the key IoT trends you have been observing?
Pareekh Jain, Research Vice President, HfS: Phil, the current state of IoT revolves around sensors and data collection and its use in sub-process or process optimization, but there is not enough visible thought or action by IoT service providers in exploiting the potential of data for the business reimagination of the Digital OneOfficeTM. Take the example of Amazon Go – the concept store where there will be no checkout queues (seriously). Shoppers can pick... and just go. The combination of IoT with artificial intelligence and machine vision is what makes Amazon GO possible. This is just one of the business reimagination possibilities of IoT, where these true digital experiences come alive, and we're finding this kind of conversation depressingly absent in our discussions with some of the service providers.
Having said that, we do see real progress with the foundations of IoT over the last couple of years and are observing five key trends in our IoT research.
1) IoT is for real, but is limited in scale and scope at present. We found many examples of PoCs and actual customer engagements. The customer engagements are small and limited in scope to a couple of business or geographical units. The organization-wide IoT strategy and implementations examples are rare.
2) IoT update is pervasive and use cases are cropping up across all industry sectors. The highest number of IoT examples we have seen are in manufacturing or Industrial IoT, smart cities, and connected cars.
3) Efficiency or cost optimization are the major drivers in IoT projects at present. This is
Posted in: Digital OneOffice, Internet of Things