Internet of Things – the OMG PoV

An interesting interview with Dr Richard Soley of the OMG arrived in my inbox today, concerning the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT). I think one important insight is probably to distinguish “industrial” IoT from “consumer” IoT – the latter may well be owned by something like Salesforce and a few other companies (in the way that Apple and Samsung “own” mobile phones), but when one talks about IoT in terms of a new industrial revolution, I think that it’s the connectivity and business value-add that matters – and, of course, Actionable Insights – not any specific technology or platform that can be owned by a particular vendor. To quote Soley:

“No single company is going to lead the IoT. No single company is going to control the ecosystem. In every conference I attend I am repeating this. In every conference someone asks this question, but there will not be an Apple that controls the IoT ecosystem. The answer is NO, NO and NO. Because the value of the technology is to connect the value chain and the supply chain, and if this would be done by one single company there wouldn’t be a service chain to interconnect.” (see link above).

I also think that when talking about the IoT one has to be careful to define one’s terms – or one’s acronyms – and to make sure that the semantics don’t change through the course of the conversation…

A new IoT term (to me), along with Industry 4.0 and some others, is the Industrial Internet, which has an Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). Keeping up is getting harder!