How Do You Define the Internet of Things?

This article originally appeared in DZone's IOT Zone.

Connected devices sharing data.

To gather insights for DZone's 2016 Internet of Things (IoT) Research Guide, we spoke to 10 executives, from nine companies, who develop IoT devices or help clients do so.

Here's who we talked to:

Craig McNeil, Managing Director of IoT, Accenture |Prathap Dendi, General Manager, AppDynamics| Aaron Lint, Vice President of Research, Arxan | Rod McLane and Justin Ruiz, Marketing, Ayla Networks | Mikko Jarva, CTO, Comptel | Mathieu Bassaic, Vice President Product Manager, Flexera | Tony Paine, CEO, Kepware | Joan Wrabetz, CTO, Quali | Tom Hunt, CEO, Windspring |

Here’s what they told us when we asked, “How do you define the ‘Internet of Things?’“

• As hardware is becoming software, anything that connects to the Internet.
• Seamlessly connecting anything allowing appropriate information to flow. Enterprises benefit by remote access monitoring, servicing, and aggregating data from multiple sites.
• A physical connection to the internet. Revolutionizing many industries with data. Connectivity anywhere with distributed computing.
• Transferring data from one location to another.
• Connected devices sharing data.
• We can model anything with an IP address and a way to talk to it through an API interface. Put the network around it and interact with it in a sandbox.
• Ability of things that contain embedded technology to sense, communicate, and collaborate with other things thus creating a network of physical objects.
• Where ever application logic is monitoring core business by watching all the lines of code to improve performance for customers to help monitor and plan business around capacity (i.e., scale-up). The edge computing layer is core to the promise of IoT. Sensors and actuators perform application logic.

Does your definition of IoT different from those above? 

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