Looking beyond customer needs: Internet of things?

Working with multiple proposals and projects in IOT, my view is that many clients are still unclear about the potential benefits of IOT. Now, when I say IOT, I should be very specific in saying Cloud oriented in IOT. Internet of Things is not a new terminology. It was there in different forms. Many organizations have connected smart devices which were mostly through on premise platform. Before joining India’s largest software service provider, I have worked with one of the world leaders in power automation where they had utilized these smart devices much in the early stage. So why is there a rush to join the bandwagon for new technology adaptation? Of course no one want to miss the bus and they are scared being potentially losing customers without adapting newer technologies. But why is it still the customers are not adapting IOT as whole new solution and going in more phased approach? Let us dive into my views in the subject

I will divide the use cases primarily into two categories

1)     IOT solutions on top of existing on premise solution

2)     New smart initiatives using the capabilities of IOT

IOT solutions on top of existing on premise solution:

This where I felt the customers are still struggling to identify the need of IOT oriented solutions but sure that they don’t want to be behind in adapting the technology and reap the benefit it can offer.

Type of use cases:

Today most of the plants are automated by primitive mechanisms like PLC’s, scada’s and maintenance and monitoring is done through existing on premise solutions. This is not only for industrial automation but terminals, fleet management and the list goes endless. Though Microsoft and other vendors is pushing edge solution as a complimentary service to their cloud offering with only certain components like stream analytics getting charged, the willingness to replace something working is relatively less.

Now the other option is to use IOT capability as a brand new solution are for the initiatives like Smart City, Smart Agriculture and as the previous case, this list is pretty long as well. This is truly getting evolved as use cases of IOT enables the ability to use sensors, gateway along with computation and cloud capabilities to help the resource utilization optimization, smart metering, and smart bin kind of use cases.

Is IOT a standalone solution?

No, I believe IOT should never be considered or marketed as a standalone solution. IOT is the combination of devices, cloud, analytics (big data), Machine Learning, archiving and dash boarding solutions. An ideal proposal should consist of all these components so that the potential of such a solution should visibly bring resource optimization, monitoring, AI powered use cases.

Where can we contribute?

As an Enterprise Architect with an advantage of client proximity, my view is that we should also be able to tap that potential to create business by explaining the use cases which normally they struggle to identify.

Solutions to propose if there is already an on premise mechanism:

In my experience, most of our projects in industrial automation projects are around existing on premise solutions. A key aspect is our ability to showcase low touch or no touch solutions which once deployed exist for a lifelong and there by clients should be able to define the ROI mostly in definite terms.

Contract Negotiation: One of the major money minting aspect of OEM manufactures in the future will be utilization of data. Many OEM manufactures have started giving services around the usage of data as a recurring paid services/subscriptions. We should be able to alert our clients about the potential service charges around the data usage and adapting IOT oriented solution can help them better negotiate the purchase contracts, rental contracts and data contracts. This can help them visualize the ROI in much earlier days.

Predictive Maintenance: Preventive maintenance is the use case of the past and with advanced analytics we are building around the data which we receive from devices, along with machine learning we should be able to do predictive maintenance which will lower the downtime along with utilization effectiveness. Also integration with Enterprise Management services like SAP, we should be able to do order placement for the parts and plan advanced maintenance schedule without affecting the plants performance.

Cloud Optimization: Though cloud had enabled a ton of achievements in limited time, one aspect that worries the organization is its usage charges. For an enterprise which has datacenter capabilities, the cost of hosting a service on premise than in cloud because of the wide adaptation of PAAS/SAAS model. This is where our cloud capabilities to utilize micro services, our ability to scale up and scale down through automation, usage of modern cloud orchestration like Kubernetes instead of cloud SAAS alternatives brings the difference. When we are able to demonstrate this optimization choice of larger enterprises, IOT adaption should be considered as need of the hour.

Monitoring Solution: Adapting cloud IOT solution over on premise solutions will help the clients achieve global monitoring system across their multiple or distributed locations which otherwise is not possible through any premise alternatives. Also global dashboards which creates visibility for Top Management to analyze the scenario and if needed deep device will help client decide such adaptation from a usability perspective.

IOT as brand new solution of existing problems:

Solutions like Smart Metering, Smart Bin which is the core use cases of Smart City, traffic management, centralized parking management, smart agriculture, solutions on security management, connected vehicles, occupancy management solutions are few examples in which IOT capabilities can be effectively used. Though these doesn’t require any specific insisting on the clients to adapt IOT, showcasing IOT oriented solutions can save money as well as better resource utilization can help the clients to decide on the initiatives much faster.

What we need to improve?

In my opinion, apart from being at the receiving end of the use cases, we should work closely with the customer management team or customer business team to help them identify the use cases. Though adapting readymade solution with shorter duration can help them assess the ROI in much earlier stage, our efforts should be to highlight the sustainability of such solutions and ability in cost saving at a longer run. We should also be able to highlight that such adaptation will help them plan the contingency much in advance, plan for faster and better resource utilization schedule.

Due to this uncertainty in ROI, many clients are interested in bring the solutions as proof of concepts and this is natural. But our ability lies in utilizing reusable assets during development and insisting the client to adapt sustainable solutions which will help them solve overspending on cloud assets. While our efforts are as much to reuse, we should also help the clients decide on adapting latest on premise solutions like Azure Edge which co-exist with Azure IOT instead of entirely independent solutions which acts different in on premise and in cloud.

Vendor specific cloud: Today we have unambiguous winner in IOT oriented solution and that is Azure. But with various Hybrid Cloud Solutions, cloud vendors getting evolved, our solutions must be more vendor independent. Some of such example is to use orchestration solutions, open source caches and queues, Open source databases and no-sql solutions. This will help clients to reduce development and migration cost if they decide to adapt a different cloud stack at a reasonable future. Data sampling, streaming should utilize more open source components like Kafka, Data Bricks (Jupiter Notebooks), etc than its SAAS/PAAS equivalents.

When it is a win-win situation, clients will be able to utilize the power of IOT solution in much earlier days and utilize the benefits it can offer. This will also help them assess or substantiate the expenditure involved while being able to calculate the ROI.