Is IoT Over?

So I was at the IOT Solutions World Congress 2023 in Barcelona last week and here are my impressions and some immediate reflections on the event. This was the 7th edition of the event, my second one as speaker and the first one as an in-person attendance. I have been to MWC in the same Fira and was quite aware of the chaos that the big events bring. But, this was not chaotic at all. The first thing that struck me was that it was fairly quick to enter the venue and it was of course much smaller and manageable event. There must have been 100 odd exhibitors and I will talk about the quality of the exhibitions in a bit.

I had planned my three days quite logically, the first day was to exclusively hear what people are talking about and made it a point to attend interesting sessions all through. And the sessions didn't disappoint me at all. Even before the day was over, I found myself saying that it was a excellent curated content and execution par excellence! I have been an organizer of two sessions at the MWC as part of my GSMA gig and I know the effort one has to put in organizing a session with meaningful outcomes. There were 5 parallel sessions at any given time, competing for your attention and presence. And none of the sessions disappointed me. The speakers were practitioners and veterans of the industry. Everyone spoke with their experience and showcased how the they have been able to execute projects and why they were doing what they were doing. The conversations were on variety of applications in manufacturing, supply chain, smart cities and home automation. The conversations were not from the vendors selling their goods, it was users, real businesses talking about their implementations and the benefits that they were reaping.

Human-centricity, Sustainability and Resilience - cornerstone of Industry 5.0

The very first session talked about Industry 5.0 highlighting that we are not talking about any revolution here as in with Industry 4.0. Industry 5.0 is building on technologies built in the industry 4.0 surge but and it is an important but, the focus is not going to be on the technology and advancements will not be measured in technical terms. The metric is going to be human-centricity, sustainability and resilience. Building things that are for the people, usable by the people; with a sustainable and resilient future in mind. This keynote by Sean O'Reagain, the deputy head of Industry 5.0 at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation set the tone of not only the conference but where the industry will go now. Talking about circular manufacturing, reducing wastages, bringing efficiencies, upskilling workers, reducing carbon footprint and investing in technologies that are resilient. There are not only policy push, academic endeavor but also investment in making the future more human-centric, sustainable and resilient. It was good to heat about Momenta's Industry5.0 fund to promote just this.

Show me the scale

There isn't and there hasn't ever been any doubt about the benefits that IoT as an amalgamation of technologies would bring and that was all about industry 4.0. The one thing that the whole of the industry is struggling with is the scale that was promised almost a decade ago. This conference talked a lot about scale, how to scale, what works and what doesn't work and Maersk, Volvo, Relayr, Siemens, KNX, talked about their case studies on how they have been able to achieve some sense of scale. I say some sense of scale because we all realize not just the technical but the commercial / business complexity of executing it. All the speakers talked about the scalability but also sustainability and resilience that they were able to achieve with the choice of their technologies.

What's in a platform?

Actually there is nothing, over the years because of technologies being developed outside the IoT domain all relevant platforms have the same architecture. So what is distinguishing them? The usability, the number of use cases they can support and scale that they were able to achieve with that. Of the big players, only AWS was making an effort to show the IoT use cases on their stand, holding technical sessions and hands-on trainings to lure the developers and businesses on their platform. It is also a reality that with IBM, SAP, Ericsson and even Google bowing out of the space, the competition is really between the AWS and Azure. Azure was not present there directly but many exhibitors showed their platforms built on MS Azure. This shows that the platforms are important for businesses that do not have core software development expertise and it will serve the application developers to align their development on either of the big platforms.

Digital Twin, Metaverse, Augmented Reality

Almost every hour there was a session on or about one of these themes. Surprising there was not much talk about the predictive maintenance as much as digital twin, metaverse and augmented reality this year. Recently predictive maintenance and AI were the dominant conversations. However, this time around all these three terms were used in talks and panels that showcased human-centric data presentations and UX.

What about the hardware and network?

Network operators were conspicuous by their absence. T-IoT was the only one there talking about cellular (NB-IoT and 5G) connectivity. There were stands by LoRaWAN/LPWAN providers and roaming SIM / MVNO providers. We have already seen that the network on its own like in the case of Sigfox is not a sustainable business proposal.

There were many hardware companies exhibiting their platform-agnostic solutions from waste bin monitoring to robotics to telemetry & logistics and home automation. Once again the focus was on the applications of the hardware rather than underlying technology and most of the hardware can either connect to MS Azure or have custom apps.

So what's in store in 2023 and beyond

It has been almost ten years that IoT and its magic has captivated all of us. It was never a monolithic tech and execution was complicated but the promise was huge. Today the tech stack is solid, fragmentation is lesser (agreement on tech stack and exit of many players), the fog is clearing up and everyone is ready to scale - the promise is achievable. The IoT world is not going to be one dominant player - the pie is too big. We are not talking about 8 billion people TAM size, it is much bigger than that and hence there will be all kinds of players participating and creating an ecosystem.

IoT, Digital Twin, AI, Metaverse, Industry 4.0 are all the terms that are there to stay and there is ever stronger policy and regulatory support to push the adoption. Industry 5.0 initiative with human-centricity, sustainability and resilience on the agenda sets up the direction of new technology development, adoption and growth.

The growth and adoption will be led by the big players (platforms, industrial automation and consultants) and application developers will piggy back on their ride. The technology is there, the application developers have to show the value and relevance to scale their solutions.

Linked Things

I was pleasantly surprised to see how far we have come with our platform - there is no competition (at least from what I saw) when it comes to human-centricity offered by our no-code platform. We have a digital twin with live paying customers and successful international deployments and have already integrated over 70 different hardware with our platform.

We are ready to take the global platform provider role with the support of the ecosystem. For more information, please write to me on [email protected] or visit our website at www.linkedthings.ai

IOT Solutions World Congress EU Science, Research and Innovation Linked Things Momenta AR for Enterprise Alliance

#industry5 #industry50 #industry40 #industrialiot