The explosion of disruptive technologies in the past couple of years have sent shock waves across the world, which is increasingly becoming innovation-centric by day. With the number of wireless technologies scaling at an exponential measure, Internet of Things (IoT) has come to be phrase to swear by today. Gartner predicts the number of things connected by the end of next year would cross 5 billion and would surpass 25 billion by 2020. We envisage that this digital paradigm will be propelled by convergent growth of SMAC technologies which include social, mobile, analytics and cloud all boosted by IoT.

This has sort of compelled even the small timers to integrate IoT into their businesses for the consumerization of the same and they are realizing at a high pace that they are not really left with much of a choice, other than to go ahead and tag along. The scope of IoT by 2020 would open up so many methods to employ technology that just about all of IoT users, be it consumers, industries, businesses, city authorities and other entities would find newer ways to optimize their operations.

To pave the way forward, today there is a greater need to address industry requirements with a holistic approach, following this we at Happiest Minds Technologies have created such niche capabilities which address customer needs in an end-to-end manner by delivering our engineering and consulting services across the whole IoT value chain of Sensors, Devices/Gateways, Network connectivity, Platforms, Apps (Cloud/Web/Mobile) and Managed Services.

Gartner estimates that although the IoT spending would hit a total of $69.5 billion in 2015, it would cross $263 billion by 2020, innovation would incorporate many ordinary objects. This is to say that while consumer applications would propel the total number of connected things, with the enterprises accounting for most of the revenue. Although the connected objects include automated teller machines, airline check-in machines, the newer objects would include many ordinary things which would be repurposed and defined with newer capacities such as digital sensing, computing and communication capabilities.

Let’s look at the key factors that will fuel IoT growth in businesses like yours:

• Economies of Scale

The cost of components such as chipsets, modules, sensors and network costs have been falling due to the high volume of IoT solutions and will continue to reduce further. Government investment in many countries in Smart Grid and Smart Cities will also support this trend.

• Ubiquitous connectivity

There is an avalanche of connectivity technologies which are out in the market, providing connectivity at various levels be it local connectivity like Bluetooth, WiFi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, 6LoWPAN, Ethernet or Cellular like HSDPA, LTE with ever increasing data pipe that will accelerate adoption and scale how devices can connect to each other or the cloud.

• Analytics

The advent of Big Data technologies has changed the way we look at the data, the inference derived from contextual sensor data can suggest where your business is heading, what changes you need to make to keep your business thriving in long term, predict failures and adopt preventive methods derived by machine learning and further enables you to reduce cost and improve customer satisfaction.

• Cloud Architecture

The cloud model of IoT will leverage how we do business, today workforce worldwide can access the cloud from anywhere. Businesses can now be access their workforce and sites even located at remote corners of the world, the cloud based IoT solution is flexible to use, and makes quick adoption possible.

• Ecosystem

The ever increasing number of participant in the IoT landscape pose challenge and at the same time it is advantageous to get benefited from their experience. Standardization and certification bodies will be helpful maintain interoperability of various components and devices.

What will be interesting to see is how CIOs carefully consider the fact that the best-in-class disruptive impact, competitive threats and opportunities will arise out of not just by digitalizing a product or service, but by creating newer business models that propose a value propositions from time to time.

Are you also ideating on how to enable your business/enterprise with IoT?

A challenging task would be to build a scalable cloud-centric IoT solution which is distributed in nature and can handle multiple architectures with plug-n-play devices. Analytics will play a key role for reaping out value from the data, here we bring in our domain experience along with data analytics in various sectors such as Utilities, BFSI, Consumer Electronics, Security, Automotive, Retail, Home/Industrial Automation and others.

Happiest Minds Technologies looks forward to seeing how we can help you to create best in class solutions and achieve your Internet of Things 2020 vision. The potential is enormous and is only limited by your imagination.