An article looks at how smart technology affects businesses.
The IoT is permeating into every aspect of industry, reported Business Insider, from manufacturing to healthcare and hospitality, with the reach far and is helping businesses to run more efficiently.
By 2020 it is expected that there will be 24 billion IoT devices connected to the internet, the report from BI Intelligence said, and noted that “businesses will be the top adopters of these new technologies”. For the big companies involved in technology and equipment ,this will mean massive opportunities both in analysing and managing devices, as well as selling the technology to perform the tasks.
As an example, the article notes that Microsoft are “betting that its Azure cloud will be the place that […] companies will want to run analysis on their IoT data”, as well as manage their unrelated devices, and companies like Cisco are relocating their “core IT products to deal with the influx of new connected devices”.
IoT is changing how technology companies do business and focuses less on products and more on the “end result they can provide”. The article explains that this is done differently to the old way of big IT vendors like HPE and Cisco, who sold their hardware and software direct to the IT department. Instead IoT will enter new markets, target different customers and more direct connections.
Colin I’Anson, HPE Fellow, said that “the owner of every project in IoT is line of business. The people who benefit from innovation can budget for innovation”, which will require a change in thought processes for some. Doug Bellin, Lead at Cisco Global Private Industries, added that “our sales team has started changing how we’re talking to the customer base”.
IoT is the tool to sell “efficiency, transparency and intelligence as a service”, and there is an idea from the IoT Solutions World Congress that they could charge for “business outcomes”, so the customer sets the goal and the vendor provides the technology to accomplish it.
Prith Banerjee, CTO at Schneider Electric, commented that “we are betting our future on IoT”, while a way to show customers is through “predictive maintenance”. which can tell the business owner if the computer is going to crash or a transformer is about to burn out. meaning a “new part” can be ordered before the old one dies.
Banerjee commented that “given that Schneider’s customers include hospitals, banks, hotels, and other industries where any kind of power failure can be a tremendous catastrophe, that’s a huge competitive edge”.