The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Most of us to access the information through browser a 25 years before. Now we have “Digital universe of Information” called Cloud freely available for us.

As the current destiny this is roughly around 4000 Exabytes , a good  analogy of 4000 Exabytes is roughly around a stack of books from Earth to Pluto and back 80 times which are created less than 20 years.

On the other side we have a mobile to access these cloud data anywhere and anytime with over 90% of land surface has mobile. With the current internet and mobile on the place the impact on the society look trivial.

We are about to connect a physical world to the internet. The planet and everything on it becomes things on the Internet Of Things. Here the things are not just a web pages there are real physical presence that we can observe and control.

What are things?

Things are everything and anything. The things we encounter in our daily life’s, machine and appliances we use in our jobs at home, the building’s we live in and care we travel in.

What are internet of things?

Wikipedia Definition – The internet of things in which everyday objects have network connectivity allowing to send and receive data.

General Definition– Connecting of physical devices, vehicles, buildings or other items embedded through sensor, electronics, software , actuator, network connectivity to collect and exchange data

Starting with the Facts:

  • The first internet of things was found by Kevin Ashton in 1999.
  • 87% of people have not heard of the term Internet Of Things.
  • ATM’s are considered some of the first IoT objects and went online as far back as 1974.
  • Number of connected objects has gone up from 6.4 billion in 2016 to 50 billion by 2020.
  • Only 10% of car were connected to the internet in 2012. By 2020, it’s estimated that 90% will connected.

As a Technologist, How do we do that?

To turn any object to smart object in the internet of things we have to take number of steps.

The Internet Of Things Defined

Focus on actions and outcome

Sense:

When we say sense in IoT “Sensors” come into picture. Sensors are not just embedding and connecting them. It’s about making sense of the gigabytes of data these devices spin off, and automating responses to that data.

Connect:

The understanding of connect will be more clear when we try to connect it with “Things” around us. With the IPv6 on place, good analogy of IPv6 would be to say, for every atom on the earth there will be 100 IP address. There are many service providers in recent days with a good tariff where we can make use of it to connect any number of devices to this digital world.

Act:

Acting on insights through iterative manner that allows people and process changes to be developed. IoT data has similar characteristics as big data, IoT data is much more complex . Acting on these data at edge of the network is very important which brings large amount of data to a relatively small which makes it more scalable and less maintenance cost.

Control:

The Communication networks in control systems are generally assumed to be deterministic and reliable. Real time operating system platforms depends on predetermined, static schedules for commutation and communication. Currently some control is happening over the internet, but at a supervisory level e.g. power-grid distribution system, waste water treatment plants and other applications. Closed-loop automation, most of the time requires a dedicated, end-to-end control system.

In IoT the real challenge is to control the system in application domains.

The key components in control systems we need to focus are Latency and Jitter, Bandwidth of the network, Cyber and physical security, and Resilience, Plug-and-play sensors and algorithm.

Share:

Sharing information is one of the important component in the IoT. In the context of IoT business, firms that develop IoT applications in products or services (as we call them IoT product providers) often know more about market-related information such as knowledge on customers and their IoT product (or service) demand. Therefore, they have their knowledge and recognition of IoT development from a market perspective. When they exchange information with firms that develop IoT technology (we call them as technology providers), they could access to more tech-related information to add to their knowledge base and to promote exploratory activities .Meanwhile, they also gain a technology perspective of IoT from this external industry information sharing.

Similarly, for IoT technology providers, they generally focus on IoT technology development and know more about tech related information, such as information about IoT technology and IoT technology trends, which generates their technology perspective with relevant knowledge and understanding of IoT technology development. When they share this information with IoT product providers, they can gather more market related information to make up their shortage information and more knowledge which will enhance their innovation capabilities.

Analyze:

The big game changer in IoT is analysis of data from different sources which is considered as flexible and compatible methodology. With the different sensors in place, there are many formats and connection interfaces which makes it very challenging to deal with observation of sensor data in real time. The key components to focus while analyzing the data are Real-time messaging service, sensor data streaming through different analysis tools.

Store:

Storing is not just the storing of data in most of the cases. In IoT ,storing data means storing time series-data. Devices create data that is sent to the main application to be sent on consumed and used. Depending on the device, the network and power consumption restraints, data can be sent real time or in batches at anytime. This use of real-time information provides a complete record for each device. When collecting information in real time with hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of devices the write speed at the database level is essential.

Each write has to be taken as it is received from the device itself and put into the database. For more traditional relational database technologies, this can be a limiting factor, as it is possible for write-requests to go beyond what the database was built for. When you have to have all the data from devices in order to create accurate and useful information, this potential loss can have a big impact

What can we get out of these components?

Being aware of the technical objects involved in IoT and their individual contributions. If we are able to extract values out of these components by involving the key stake holders from different verticals of industry, the innovation of IoT begins.

Why IoT Now?

Factors why IoT becoming more popular

Availability

IoT devices are already common, cheap and easy to replace. To support all these IoT devices there is already a basic infrastructure in place. By 2018 half of the world which includes humans, machines, buildings and so on will be connected to the internet.

Affordability

The innovation in the sensors has changed dramatically over the years resulting, average cost of sensors used in IoT will drop even more in coming years. The price of a sensor will be down almost by $0.30 by the end of the decade.

Scalability

These days many IoT devices offer simple “Plug and play” functionality. These IoT devices are highly flexible, offering short or long term solutions for companies, households, countries.

Think Big, start small, scale fast

Aspects to consider when designing IoT applications

Examples

The Smart Industrial Cooler

  • Millions of un-monitored assets, that worth billions of dollars, are located in various outlets:

Retail stores

Gas Stations

Pharmacies

  • Devices may hold stock that needs to be maintained at specific temperature and humidity.
  • Devices are often under-utilized, stocked out, powered off or missing.
  • No insight of device performance or recognition per-device.
  • Device health and location are audited by agents once every few months.

Outcome Based Approach

  • Monitor and manage large number of customers facing devices such as coolers, chillers, vending machines and others.
  • Reduce operational cost and increase revenues by optimizing asset availability and utilization.
  • Improve customer satisfaction by ensuring correct Storage conditions and perishable goods.
  • Can turn appliance or product container into a Sales and marketing platform.
  • Based on SAP robust cloud infrastructure and HANA in-memory database.

Next Steps – Start Small

Use the simplest IoT scenario using SAP HANA / SAP HANA Cloud platform

  • Devices will have internet connectivity.
  • The number of devices and data volumes are reasonable for direct connection via REST.
  • Data is captured in SAP HANA with low storage requirement.

SAP HANA – IoT platform enables connecting embedded devices to SAP HANA. The basic components include Network enabled devices which gather sensor data and publish the data to SAP HANA – IoT platform through Edge Gateway.

Edge Gateway will process and analyze complex events and sensor data embedded in IoT devices in real time. And then sync this Edge data with existing SAP backend infrastructure (On premise and On demand).

Targeted users will receive alerts of the events from SAP IoT on a Fiori based application. The data gathered at SAP HANA will be further processed using components like predictive analytics, data mining, text analysis and Spatial Data Processing to generate reports (analytical applications).

It’s time for organizations to leverage technology offerings now! Go ahead…digitialize your existing investments.

We would like to share our experience and love to hear your challenges. Feel free to contact us if you require any further information at info@vaspp.com or call on +33 688 337 375