A New Age for the Internet of Things

A few years ago, many organizations viewed the Internet of Things (IoT) as a promising experiment. Today, it’s become a strategic focus at the highest levels of enterprises and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Increasingly, business leaders, not just IT, view IoT as a platform for digital transformation: How can we use data collected from our physical assets, channeled through our enterprise systems, to transform our business?

Two key innovations are driving this shift:

The emergence of the “deep edge”: For IoT to fuel business transformation, the industry has to rethink where the intelligence in distributed IoT applications should live. In the device? At the network edge? In the cloud? Yes, all of the above. New “deep edge” IoT technology intelligently distributes business logic and processing capabilities across cloud, local edge networks and IoT endpoints themselves. It allows enterprises to deploy sophisticated IoT applications, even when using small, constrained endpoints that are deeply embedded in the assets they’re tracking.

New cellular standards: 3GPP Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) cellular technology provides a standardized, affordable path to extend IoT to practically limitless use cases. New LPWA cellular standards, including LTE CAT-M and NB-IoT, offer a means to collect sensor and asset data from remote devices that rely solely on battery power. They expand coverage to anywhere that LTE networks reach—effectively anywhere in the world—while reducing connectivity costs with solutions designed and priced specifically for IoT applications.

A few years ago, many organizations viewed the Internet of Things (IoT) as a promising experiment. Today, it’s become a strategic focus at the highest levels of enterprises and original equipment manufacturers

The pieces are now in place for businesses in every industry to harness IoT insights to launch new business models and operate more efficiently and profitably. But one major hurdle remains: dealing with the massive complexity involved in collecting data from diverse endpoints and assets. Enterprises are still waiting for IoT to become a ready-to-use utility that any organization or developer can easily exploit.