Category Archives for Internet of Things (IoT)

Gary’s Book Club Features 2018’s Best Tech Books on CTA Stage at CES 2019

Welcome to the New Year. 2018 was a pivotal year for GigaOm with significant growth in both our research and new media initiatives, and as we kick-start 2019 I’m excited to attend CES.

There I will join nine notable authors who are invited to share their books as part of  Gary’s Book Club at the CES event.

Each year CTA president/CEO Gary Shapiro promotes what he considers the best technology-related books published in the previous year.

This year’s authors include Mark Mueller-Eberstein and Phil Klein, Heidi Forbes Öste, Ph.D., Frances West, Gary Shapiro, Charlie Fink, Kristen Gallerneaux, Kate O’Neill, John Chambers, and Diane Brady, Scott Brown, and myself.

Our collective works explore everything from blockchain to digital mastery, disruptive innovation, AR and VR, to the future of technology and humanity, and much more.

I am excited and honored that my latest work “The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers and the Future of Humanity” is also among the titles featured at CES.

Authors will start speaking at 10 am today, January 8, on the CTA Stage and will continue on the half-hour throughout the day and tomorrow with a book signing following each discussion.

I am especially looking forward to learning more about all the books featured this year. I hope you’ll join me.

 

Tuesday, January 8

Mark Mueller-Eberstein & Phil Klein
Blockchain: The Trust Technology for Human Cooperation

CTA Stage: 10 AM
Booth Signing: 10:30-11:30 AM

Blockchain technology is as fundamental as the Internet and the invention of governance and documentation of the property.

Learn the implications of being able to agree with certainty, of systems of trust where transactions are visible, and where people, organizations, and governance can be more successful and maintain accountability.

 

Heidi Forbes Öste, Ph.D.
Digital Self Mastery Across Generations: How to Master Your Relationship with Technology to Amplify Productivity and Connection in the Digital Era

CTA Stage: 1 PM
Booth Signing: 1:30-2:30 PM

Dr. Forbes Oste is a behavioral scientist, author of the best-selling Digital Self Mastery series, and Executive Producer of Evolving Digital Self podcast.

Her groundbreaking work provides a unique perspective on how to survive and thrive in the digital era, integrating behavior science, wellbeing, and system thinking.

She is a passionate advocate for digital wellbeing as a key element for future-proofing human and organization systems.

Frances West
Authentic Inclusion Drives Disruptive Innovation
CTA Stage: 2 PM
Booth Signing: 2:30-3:30 PM

In this essential blueprint, Frances reveals how putting humans first—and building inclusion into business strategies, technological infrastructure, and organizational processes—can enable companies to bring principle, purpose, and profit into a state of harmonious alignment for sustainable talent acquisition, market expansion, and business differentiation.

 

Byron Reese
The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers and the Future of Humanity
CTA Stage: 3:30 PM
Booth Signing: 4-5 PM

“You don’t have to have all the answers — even the experts don’t agree.

But The Fourth Age successfully forces us to face just how thorny those questions are…entertaining and engaging…” – The New York Times.

Futurist and GigaOm CEO, Byron Reese, offers a fascinating insight into AI, robotics, and their extraordinary implications for our species.

 

Wednesday, January 9

Gary Shapiro
Ninja Future
CTA Stage: 10:00-10:30 AM

Tuesday, January 8
Booth Signings: 11:45 AM-12:45 PM

Thursday, January 10
Booth Signing: 10:30-11:30 AM

Friday, January 11
Booth Signing: 10-11 AM

Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, casts his eye toward the future, charting how the innovative technologies of today will transform not only the way business is done but society itself—and how we can use them to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving world

Charlie Fink
Charlie Fink’s Metaverse: An AR Enabled Guide to AR & VR
CTA Stage: 11 AM
Booth Signing: 11:30 AM-12:30 PM

Charlie Fink, who covers XR for Forbes, brings thirty-five years of experience as an entertainment and technology executive to what he calls “the greatest business and technology story of our time.”

Fink has created a guide to emerging VR & AR that is engaging to professionals, accessible to non-technical readers, and relentlessly entertaining to everyone.

The book features original character animation, presented through a free app, “Fink Metaverse,” available in the App Store and Google Play.

Kristen Gallerneaux
High Static, Dead Lines

CTA Stage: 1 PM
Booth Signing: 1:30-2:30 PM

In High Static, Dead Lines, media historian and artist Kristen Gallerneaux weaves a literary mix tape that explores the entwined boundaries between sound, material culture, landscape, and esoteric belief.

Essays and fictocritical interludes are arranged to evoke a network of ley lines for the “sonic specter” to travel through—a hypothetical presence that manifests itself as an invisible layer of noise alongside the conventional histories of technological artifacts.

Kate O’Neill
Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans

CTA Stage: 3:30 PM
Booth Signing: 4-5 PM

O’Neill defines a new model of business leader — the “tech humanist” — as developing honest assessments of organizational goals that move far beyond traditional P&L statements, and peer deeper into the consequences of everyday human experience design within our increasingly tech-driven culture.

 

Thursday, January 10

John Chambers & Diane Brady

Connecting the Dots

CTA Stage: 11:30 AM
Booth Signing: 12:00-1:00 PM

In Connecting the Dots, former Chairman and CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, shares his unique strategies for winning in a digital world.

From his early lessons and struggles with dyslexia in West Virginia to his bold bets and battles with some of the biggest names in tech, Chambers gives readers a playbook on how to act before the market shifts, tap customers for strategy, partner for growth, build teams, and disrupt themselves.

 

Scott Brown

(C)lean Messaging

CTA Stage: 12:30 PM
Booth Signing: 1-2 PM

Scott Brown is an 8x startup founder and coveted messaging coach to founders around the world.

He has now released his framework that allows anyone to sell their idea to investors, customers, and the media using (C)lean Messaging.

 

About CES:

CES® is the world’s gathering place for all who thrive on the business of consumer technologies.

It has served as the proving ground for innovators and breakthrough technologies for 50 years-the global stages where next-generation innovations are introduced to the marketplace.

As the largest hands-on event of its kind, CES features all aspects of the industry.

Owned and produced by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)TM, it attracts the world’s business leaders and pioneering thinkers.

Check out CES video highlights. Follow CES online at CES.tech and on social.

 

About Consumer Technology Association:

Consumer Technology Association (CTA) is the trade association representing the $321 billion U.S. consumer technology industry, which supports more than 15 million U.S. jobs. More than 2,200 companies – 80 percent are small businesses and startups; others are among the world’s best-known brands – enjoy the benefits of CTA membership including policy advocacy, market research, technical education, industry promotion, standards development, and fostering of business and strategic relationships.

CTA also owns and produces CES® – the world’s gathering place for all who thrive on the business of consumer technologies.

Profits from CES are reinvested into CTA’s industry services.

Source: gigaom.com

Five Questions for the Thinaire Platform

Ever since I was involved in developing a mobile application myself, I have gained an undue fascination with mobile application platforms – also known as, “why bother building all the component pieces, when they should be a solved problem?”

The retail space is no exception, as stores feel they need to get onto the mobile bandwagon but can to easily end up reinventing the wheel without feeling the potential benefits.

Solving this is not as simple as it seems – retailers want to be customer-focused without becoming creeoptimize want to optimize their interactions and grow loyalty without unnecessary intrusion; as they look to become more effective and efficient, they want to learn by doing, but their well-meant efforts can become expensive dead-ends.

It’s too easy to blow the budget before achieving the goals, even if these are known at the outset.

Faced with such dilemmas, the availability of a platform of components for ‘smarter’ retail would appear to be a boon.

So, what gives?

I had an email exchange with Thinaire CEO, Mike Ventimiglia, to find out more.

 

1. In the face of an increasingly diverse pool of “smart” retail solutions, what is the problem Thinaire sets out to solve?

For far too many retailers, a customer that doesn’t have their branded app, and isn’t logged in, is essentially invisible.

On top of that, when we ask retailers about the penetration rates of their apps, we generally get numbers well under 10%, which is frighteningly low.

That’s often where the conversation with Thinaire starts: our technologies dramatically lower the effort required by consumers to access the full range of smarter retail solutions.

Whether it’s fine-grained location data driving product positioning, advanced loyalty programs, shelf-talkers, unattended retail, or all of the above and more, Thinaire reduces friction, simplifies delivery, and derives meaningful data at every stage of the customer journey.

In many cases, Thinaire is able to deliver measurably better retail experiences with no requirement for an app, and we offer a range of no-CAPEX options if there is any infrastructure required to support any particular deployment.

 

2. What consumer demographics are driving the need for digitally oriented solutions?

We know that under 25’s spend, on average, 9 hours per day curating their digital selves, and other cohorts are not far behind.

Everyone demands that their smart device intercedes with the real world for them!

This data signals, among other things, a massive and growing demand for content to support each individual’s “personal brand.”

So retail brands that frictionlessly deliver images, video, offers, experiences, etc. aligned with customers’ “personal brands.”

This will generate a large pool of passionate advocates by making authentic personal recommendations, and hence building their brands concurrently.

 

3. And meanwhile, what kinds of efficiency savings can be had by smarter use of in-store technology?

The future of retail is either extremely high-touch or no-touch. In other words, fully digitally connected, personalized immersive experiences, or simply “get out of my way” unattended.

To realize efficiencies from “high-touch,” cycle time is absolutely key.

So technology that already knows who you are and what you want before you’re even in the retail space (for example) can powerfully assist in delivering a faster turnaround.

Thinaire’s “virtual loyalty” technologies are deployed to provide exactly this capability.

The drivers of “no-touch” are quite different.

For these applications, Thinaire’s technologies are put to use (for example) replacing expensive and failure-prone kiosks, with simpler, cheaper, faster all-screen units more responsive to the customer’s smart device by leveraging the device’s own capabilities.

4. How ‘digitally ready’ does an organization have to be to adopt solutions such as Thinaire?

Our customers range from digital natives to analog high-touch retailers taking their first steps in digital by customer demand.

Our ability to deploy both the hardware and the software required for even the most complex requirement means we are truly “full service.”

On the other hand, if the customer just wants smarter sensors to pour quality data into their digitally-aware CRM, we can do that too.

5. How are things going to evolve in the next 3-5 years would you say?

There’s a wonderful video on YouTube of a 3-year-old interacting with a printed photograph.

She attempts to make it zoom by pinching her fingers, and then immediately hands it to Mommy, insisting “It’s broken!”

Of course, given her expectations of how photos work on her parent’s devices, for her, it really is broken!

That’s a metaphor for the next 3-5 years in retail.

Retailers that don’t meet consumer expectations by leveraging all the capabilities of customer’s smart devices will be seen by those same customers as “broken.”

 

My Take: People will always buy, but how?

The retail industry, which has often been cited as slow to the digital revolution party, is seeing the world change beneath its feet.

While retail organizations may be seen as the blocker, if the problem was so simple to solve, most retailers would have changed by now.

But simply saying “you need to think omnichannel,” or “how about digital transformation,” comes up against issues of integration, of supply chain complexity, and of a fast-moving environment which cannot afford to stop for a day, never mind the weeks required to make a sustainable difference.

Technology can obviously help, particularly pre-tested platforms of functionality such as Thinaire.

Few startups are building from scratch, but generally, they target a specific problem whereas major retailers have to cover all their bases.

Meanwhile, the number of retail, marketing, and advertising technology providers continues to proliferate, increasing the pressure to succeed at the same time as reducing clarity on the viable options.

Nonetheless, the starting point has to be a recognition that retailers cannot go it alone, but need to rely on a technology platform.

There is simply no time to re-invent the wheel: using pre-built capabilities, retailers can learn more quickly about the needs of their customers, their stores, their offerings, and their processes.

Failing fast, improving, and then succeeding has to be a better option than just failing.

Source: gigaom.com

Report: A developer’s checklist for deploying the internet of things

Our library of 1700 research reports is available only to our subscribers.

We occasionally release ones for our larger audience to benefit from.

This is one such report.

If you would like access to our entire library, please subscribe here.

Subscribers will have access to our 2017 editorial calendar, archived reports, and video coverage from our 2016 and 2017 events.

 

A developer’s checklist for deploying the internet of things by Rich Morrow:

The “things” in the “internet of things” (IoT) encompass a wide range of devices:

• sensors and sensor arrays like the Nest and SmartThings,
• wearables like the Pebble smartwatch and Google Glass,
• and embedded technologies like Tesla and Ford’s Smart Cars.

Even Samsung, the current leader of the mobile space, has its eyes set on the smart-home market, with refrigerators that will text you (or the Amazon Grocery delivery truck) when you’re out of milk.

 

The possibilities are staggering, but these “things” represent some significant challenges to app developers.

Developers, in particular, will have to cope with an unprecedented explosion of supported devices and form factors, extensive network optimizations to make both the front end and back end more responsive, highly capable edge devices to which more processing may (and should) be pushed, and finally, a plan to capture, process, and wrangle business value and from all of the data these devices generate.

While each development project will require different skills, and the IoT is still in its earliest stages, there are certain tools with which budding IoT developers should be familiar.

To read the full report click here.

Source: gigaom.com

IoT in the Enterprise: Who’s Doing it, What’s Happening and What’s Working?

Whether in the mainstream media, the tech press or in business circles, a lot has been made of the Internet of Things (IoT). But IoT is about a lot more than internet connectivity for far-flung machines and devices.

It’s about collecting sensor readings and other data from those “things.”

Why is providing value from that data so important?

A confluence of factors in technology and business has given rise to IoT’s utility and the fascination around it.

 

Trends Giving Rise to IoT

The combination of cloud computing, streaming data, Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence, and the broader prospect of digital transformation have created a readiness in the market for generation, consumption, and analysis of time-series data that is machine- and sensor-produced.

While many of us may think of IoT in the consumer realm, conjuring up images of home automation and turning lights on and off with our personal digital assistants, it’s the industrial realm where IoT really shines.

For the most part, it’s sensor devices found in engine rooms, factories, elevators, automobiles (both self-driving and conventional), turbines, farms, and other industrial settings, that are leading the charge.

Sensors can report all types of conditions including temperature, moisture, pressure, the number of people in close proximity, the working order of a given component, or raw images and video.

Companies can monitor what these sensors are reporting, and can do so repeatedly, over very short intervals.

While sensors used to just tell us if conditions were within a normal range, now they can do much more.

Instead of just reading current conditions, this data can be saved and analyzed so that historical conditions can be correlated with certain phenomena.

Doing this facilitates the construction of predictive models so that certain sensor-reported conditions can be used to forecast specific phenomena. For example, patterns in the temperature of a piece of equipment may provide tell-tale signs of an impending failure.

And it probably goes without saying, being able to forecast such breakdowns before they happen can vastly reduce stress and revenue shortfalls stemming from lapses in operational continuity.

The above provides an operations-based explanation for why IoT is such a phenomenon, but what about the business reasons?

There are several. For one, companies are shifting their computing infrastructure from a mostly on-premises approach to a hybrid approach with some assets in the cloud.

When analytics is one of the workloads that move to the cloud, things get teed up nicely for IoT.

Not only does cloud storage allow for arbitrarily large data sets, but it allows them to grow over time, even geometrically, as necessary.

And since sensor data originates from remote locations, storing it in the cloud works well.

There’s no reason to store data on-premises that doesn’t originate there.

On the other hand, data that does originate from and is stored on-premises may be needed in the analysis work, along with the sensor data.

That means the analytics system in play must be capable of both blending data from different data sets and working in a hybrid on-premises/cloud modality.

In fact, modern cloud-based analytics systems can do this very well, further facilitating the IoT workflows.

Perhaps the most important precondition for IoT, though, is the yearning businesses have to work with data in real-time, acting on new conditions as soon as they arise. IoT data—and the patterns for processing it—are completely aligned with that principle, often referred to as a data-driven culture.

Further, because IoT sensor readings are formatted as time-series data (successive point-in-time recordings of the sensor readings), they lend themselves well to AI and predictive analytics, both of which work extremely well with time-series data, as the predictions are often just additional, extrapolated data points in the series.

All of these technological developments and breakthroughs combine to serve as the cradle for digital transformation, a broad term that describes the journey to data mastery and data-driven outcomes.

In fact, when the essence of IoT is considered, digital transformation is what it’s all about: getting real-time data on the operations of a business, performing immediate descriptive and predictive analytics on it, and acting on the results.

 

Background on the Survey

With all of that in mind, Gigaom surveyed a large group of Enterprise customers (300 Enterprise IT Executives) to learn about the IoT initiatives in their organizations.

Our goals were to determine the inspiration for IoT initiatives, the business units responsible for pushing them, the groups that provided the funding, as well as those units that led them.

And beyond the quest for general knowledge about which business units play which role, we wanted to know how IT (information technology) and OT (operations technology) collaborated for IoT initiatives.

We also wanted to gain insight into the relative maturity of organizations’ IoT projects, and the organizations’ IoT maturity overall.

Also, as with all Gigaom surveys, we asked several categorizing questions—for example, size of the organization and the industry it works within—up-front, so that we could drill down to, and correlate answers to the other questions with these subgroupings.

Beyond learning who is driving IoT and what relative maturity of organizations doing IoT, we also set out to determine the scope of the projects, the general rate of success in their implementation, and how different companies implementing IoT approach vendor selection, as they proceed from planning to project implementation.

Like IoT itself, the overall goal of this survey was to discern things both descriptive and prescriptive.

We wanted to see what customers have done, how much they’ve covered, how they’ve done it, and what impact these choices may have had on their success.

Source: gigaom.com

When IoTs Become BOTs, The Dark Side of Connectedness

Each day our lives become more connected. We revel in our mastery over our domain as we tap on smartphones to change the heat in our home, see who’s at the front door or remotely start our car on a snowy morning.

Connectivity makes our lives easier, and more enjoyable.

There is a dark side though to all of this connectedness, if we can control these devices then it’s possible others can as well.

Last Friday we saw a harbinger of what can be achieved with the Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are poorly designed.

At one point Dyn reported 10s of millions of IoT device IP addresses that were sending them huge volumes of bogus network traffic.

Dyn is one of the root Name Servers on the Internet.

This congestion effectively slowed access to a crawl for east coast US users of Amazon, Twitter, Github, Reddit, and many other popular sites.

The compromised IoT devices all appear to be built using the Swiss Army knife of Embedded Linux, BusyBox, and as such might not be readily patchable.

Most of these IoT devices are webcams, smart DVRs, and home routers, but they are just the tip of the 1.2 million device iceberg that is the Mirai Botnet.

To put this number in perspective the current active duty strength of the US Armed Forces is nearly the same number, 1.28 million.

Image all of our active-duty military sitting at keyboards running programs to attack a single website, that’s the power that “Anna_Senpai” the single person behind Mirai wields.

Now by contrast Mirai isn’t the largest BOTnet we’ve ever seen, others like Conficker or Cutwall were larger, but this is the first one built entirely of IoT devices.

So how can we cut Mirai off at the knees?

Well, it’s actually pretty simple, create a unique user id and password on all your IoT devices.

All the devices in Mirai were hijacked because the owners of these devices never changed the product’s default user id or password.

If you’re still running with the defaults on your home router and other IoT devices, please change them now.

You may be a slave to Mirai, and not even know it.

What if you’re the next target for Mirai, how can you defend yourself?

Turns out Dyn wasn’t the first victim, a month earlier Mirai was used to attack Brian Krebs, noted cyber security blogger.

Brian Krebs had recently published an article on a company that sold DDoS as a service.

At its peak the DDoS assault against his Blog reached 620 Gigabits/second, effectively silencing Krebs for a short time.

When attackers are this diverse the most effective solution is often to distribute the attack load across numerous devices and deploy special hardware filtering in silicon at the edge that is designed to mitigate these attacks.

Brian Krebs’s case,

In Brian Krebs’s case, he moved over to Google’s “Project Shield” a platform designed to host journalists who otherwise might be silenced by DDoS attacks.

Russell Stern has served as President and CEO at Solarflare Communications since 2004.

He was formerly President and CEO at JNI Corporation in San Diego, California. Prior to JNI, Stern served as General Manager and COO at Quantum Corporation.

Source: gigaom.com

Five questions for… the Thinaire platform

Ever since I was involved in developing a mobile application myself, I have gained an undue fascination with mobile application platforms – also known as, “why bother building all the component pieces, when they should be a solved problem?”

The retail space is no exception, as stores feel they need to get onto the mobile bandwagon but can to easily end up reinventing the wheel without feeling the potential benefits.

Solving this is not as simple as it seems – retailers want to be customer-focused without becoming creepy.

They want to optimize their interactions and grow loyalty without unnecessary intrusion.

As they look to become more effective and efficient, they want to learn by doing, but their well-meant efforts can become expensive dead-ends.

It’s too easy to blow the budget before achieving the goals, even if these are known at the outset.

Faced with such dilemmas, the availability of a platform of components for ‘smarter’ retail would appear to be a boon.

So, what gives? I had an email exchange with Thinaire CEO, Mike Ventimiglia, to find out more.

 

5 Questions for Thinaire Platform:

 

My Take: People will always buy, but how?

The retail industry, which has often been cited as slow to the digital revolution party, is seeing the world change beneath its feet.

While retail organizations may be seen as the blocker, if the problem was so simple to solve, most retailers would have changed by now.

But simply saying “you need to think omnichannel,” or “how about digital transformation,” comes up against issues of integration, of supply chain complexity, and of a fast-moving environment which cannot afford to stop for a day, never mind the weeks required to make a sustainable difference.

Technology can obviously help, particularly pre-tested platforms of functionality such as Thinaire.

Few startups are building from scratch, but generally, they target a specific problem whereas major retailers have to cover all their bases.

Meanwhile, the number of retail, marketing, and advertising technology providers continues to proliferate, increasing the pressure to succeed at the same time as reducing clarity on the viable options.

Nonetheless, the starting point has to be a recognition that retailers cannot go it alone, but need to rely on a technology platform.

There is simply no time to re-invent the wheel: using pre-built capabilities, retailers can learn more quickly about the needs of their customers, their stores, their offerings, and their processes.

Failing fast, improving, and then succeeding has to be a better option than just failing.

Source: gigaom.com

IoT in the Enterprise: Who’s Doing it, What’s Happening and What’s Working?

Whether in the mainstream media, the tech press or in business circles, a lot has been made of the Internet of Things (IoT). But IoT is about a lot more than internet connectivity for far-flung machines and devices. It’s about collecting sensor readings and other data from those “things.”

Why is providing value from that data so important? A confluence of factors in technology and business has given rise to IoT’s utility and the fascination around it.

 

Trends Giving Rise to IoT

The combination of cloud computing, streaming data, Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence, and the broader prospect of digital transformation have created a readiness in the market for generation, consumption, and analysis of time-series data that is machine- and sensor-produced.

While many of us may think of IoT in the consumer realm, conjuring up images of home automation and turning lights on and off with our personal digital assistants, it’s the industrial realm where IoT really shines.

For the most part, it’s sensor devices found in engine rooms, factories, elevators, automobiles (both self-driving and conventional), turbines, farms, and other industrial settings, that are leading the charge.

Sensors can report all types of conditions including temperature, moisture, pressure, the number of people in close proximity, the working order of a given component, or raw images and video.

Companies can monitor what these sensors are reporting, and can do so repeatedly, over very short intervals. While sensors used to just tell us if conditions were within a normal range, now they can do much more. Instead of just reading current conditions, this data can be saved and analyzed so that historical conditions can be correlated with certain phenomena.

Doing this facilitates the construction of predictive models so that certain sensor-reported conditions can be used to forecast specific phenomena. For example, patterns in the temperature of a piece of equipment may provide tell-tale signs of an impending failure.

And it probably goes without saying, being able to forecast such breakdowns before they happen can vastly reduce stress and revenue shortfalls stemming from lapses in operational continuity.

The above provides an operations-based explanation for why IoT is such a phenomenon, but what about the business reasons?

There are several. For one, companies are shifting their computing infrastructure from a mostly on-premises approach to a hybrid approach with some assets in the cloud. When analytics is one of the workloads that move to the cloud, things get teed up nicely for IoT.

Not only does cloud storage allow for arbitrarily large data sets, but it allows them to grow over time, even geometrically, as necessary.

And since sensor data originates from remote locations, storing it in the cloud works well. There’s no reason to store data on-premises that doesn’t originate there.

On the other hand, data that does originate from and is stored on-premises may be needed in the analysis work, along with the sensor data. That means the analytics system in play must be capable of both blending data from different data sets and working in a hybrid on-premises/cloud modality.

In fact, modern cloud-based analytics systems can do this very well, further facilitating the IoT workflows.

Perhaps the most important precondition for IoT, though, is the yearning businesses have to work with data in real-time, acting on new conditions as soon as they arise. IoT data—and the patterns for processing it—are completely aligned with that principle, often referred to as a data-driven culture.

Further, because IoT sensor readings are formatted as time-series data (successive point-in-time recordings of the sensor readings), they lend themselves well to AI and predictive analytics, both of which work extremely well with time-series data, as the predictions are often just additional, extrapolated data points in the series.

All of these technological developments and breakthroughs combine to serve as the cradle for digital transformation, a broad term that describes the journey to data mastery and data-driven outcomes.

In fact, when the essence of IoT is considered, digital transformation is what it’s all about: getting real-time data on the operations of a business, performing immediate descriptive and predictive analytics on it, and acting on the results.

 

Background on the Survey

With all of that in mind, Gigaom surveyed a large group of Enterprise customers (300 Enterprise IT Executives) to learn about the IoT initiatives in their organizations.

Our goals were to determine the inspiration for IoT initiatives, the business units responsible for pushing them, the groups that provided the funding, as well as those units that led them.

And beyond the quest for general knowledge about which business units play which role, we wanted to know how IT (information technology) and OT (operations technology) collaborated for IoT initiatives.

We also wanted to gain insight into the relative maturity of organizations’ IoT projects, and the organizations’ IoT maturity overall.

Also, as with all Gigaom surveys, we asked several categorizing questions—for example, size of the organization and the industry it works within—up-front, so that we could drill down to, and correlate answers to the other questions with these subgroupings.

Beyond learning who is driving IoT and what relative maturity of organizations doing IoT, we also set out to determine the scope of the projects, the general rate of success in their implementation, and how different companies implementing IoT approach vendor selection, as they proceed from planning to project implementation.

Like IoT itself, the overall goal of this survey was to discern things both descriptive and prescriptive. We wanted to see what customers have done, how much they’ve covered, how they’ve done it, and what impact these choices may have had on their success.

Read more: gigaom.com