Improving business outcomes with IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly gaining steam because the first wave of applications and workloads is delivering tangible financial and operational value for enterprises and a positive experience for consumers. Industrial manufacturing, connected homes, and buildings, connected vehicles, retail, and healthcare are just the tip of the IoT iceberg—with more to come.

Not surprisingly, it’s easy to be impressed by the numbers presented in market research about the size and growth of IoT. Billions of connected devices.

Trillions of dollars in economic value. Millions of developers building software for connected devices.

But behind the numbers is the real story—the ability to get invaluable data from a broad array of things connected to the cloud. This “from the edge to the cloud” phenomenon of creating things, collecting data, analysing data and acting on new insights is reshaping the landscape of what we can do with technology to achieve business benefits.

Organisations are deploying more IoT devices and using them to support mission-critical use cases— everything from municipal water supply purification system monitoring to robotic manufacturing processes. These rapidly expanding implementations are driven by the need to collect and analyse data from a wide swath of devices. Increasingly, this is happening in the public cloud, where enterprises can take advantage of economic, operational, security and scalability advantages offered by that platform, without having to manage complex infrastructure.

This paper looks at some of the software and services available to enterprises looking to build IoT applications that collect, process, analyse and act on data generated by connected devices.