IoT Needs to Die
David Houghton
Business Development, Enterprise Solution Sales, Team Building, Strategy, SaaS
Enjoying a rare event in here in Durham, NC, I took a walk with my neighbor while it snowed this weekend. As we chatted, he asked me if I thought the Internet of Things (IoT) was gonna fade like other overhyped trends or was it worth investing in? When I asked him how he defined IoT, it became clear he viewed it as a piece of technology. All I could do was sigh, as I said to myself, “IoT needs to die.”
It’s not that I don’t believe IoT is real or doesn't have value; it’s just that IoT is not a thing. It’s not some omni-technology with a skew that you can buy online. In fact, no one company even offers an IoT. And yet, this characterization continues, unabashed. Be interesting to see how many corporate year-end letters cited Green and IoT.
Perhaps the simplest way to think of IoT is the natural evolution of automation. The fact is, like automation, IoT incorporates a portfolio of technologies (hardware, software and networking), many of which have been in existence for decades, advancing over time and are only now powerful enough, small enough and cheap enough to change the paradigm of what can be automated.
That said, technology is simply an enabler and can only automate when applied to a process. Therefore, it’s the application of the technology that becomes meaningful. To be clear, the power of IoT comes from the ability to apply disparate technologies to stitch together a set of end-to-end processes, connecting the edge with the enterprise. This phenomenon comes in many forms and no one size fits all.
The use cases, solutions and services are insurmountable and will literally touch every industry. They’ll change business models, disrupt markets, take down corporate titans, catapult startups and drive economies. And although IoT will be the core enabler, you’ll know them as automated inventory management, remote patient monitoring, smart meters, track and trace, connected cars, predictive maintenance, fleet management and energy distribution and storage to name a few.
So, if someone says they’re doing IoT, perhaps the response should be “duh.”
Fractional CMO | Growth thought-leader, speaker, author | AI, IoT, SaaS l Knowledge-to-value processes
5 年David this article has aged well. Like other terms (Industry 4.0, AI, etc...) attempting to describe an emergent and complex socio-technical process using language from the plain old Internet era, IoT is a "semantic hazard." Currently, there are 16 different definitions of IoT in the academic literature (Oberlander, 2018), and in IoT business...well, as many definitions of IoT as there are companies selling it.??
Tech Investor - Board Director - Operating Executive - CEO and Founder, Pisgah Forest Ventures LLC
6 年Just read this and despite my title and work at IBM ... the article is pretty spot on ... maybe IoT needs to be absorbed into what we are really talking about, vs "die", but the spirit is dead on ... happy to chat further.
Retired
7 年Would you rather all it AoT? (Automation of Things) or do you have a more descriptive name?
Building Roam Network | Outlier Ventures DePIN ??
7 年"great minds think alike" . Its almost similar to call any martial art "karate" as this seems to be the most socially visible manifestation of the activity. . The moment we stop calling it IoT but identify the actual (real) business need and solution behind it, then the name becomes clear: home security and automation, pet tracking, water AMI, etc. Perhaps not really a kill, but rather a naming convention corresponding to business understanding.
Building Generative AI , Single and Multiple Agents for Enterprises | Mentor | Agentic AI expert | Advisor | Gen AI Lead/Architect | Authoring Gen AI Agents Book
7 年IoT alone will not be sufficient to derive value it should be accomplished by Big Data, AI, ML , Blockchain so on