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  • The Internet of Things is an idea that's been around for maybe 10 or 15 years or so. And

  • I think the first time I heard about it there was some discussion of a European appliance

  • manufacturer who had a refrigerator that was connected to the network, the Internet. And

  • I think the scenarios that were playing out there were: "Okay, what if the refrigerator

  • was smart and knew enough to adjust temperatures?" Maybe it knew enough to send a request or

  • a message to the manufacture saying "Hey, the compressor is going bad." That was the

  • first time I had heard about this idea of connecting a product to the network. A product

  • that wasn't a traditional computer; wasn't something that we thought was supposed to

  • be connected to the network or interconnected. And that started to open up a lot of people's

  • eyes I think to this idea. It may not have been the first theoretical time that it was

  • discussed but it was the first time that I think popular media and culture started talking

  • about this idea.

  • But, for whatever reason that connected refrigerator didn't really take off. The idea really didn't

  • kind of explode. Then we started hearing about the connected washing machine in the same

  • kind of context. And I think that that idea of the Internet of Things then started to

  • refine a bit and we heard about machine-to-machine communication. The idea that instead of human

  • to machine, so sort of through a screen or through a webpage or through our mobile phones

  • or whatever, that machines would talk to one another. So the idea of a stock quote generating

  • a message that would be sent to another machine that might think about "Okay now I may need

  • to make a trade." So the automated trading world. Or a weather forecast that's reported

  • online triggering a message to another system that's going to adjust stock levels. So this

  • idea that machines might talk to one another without a human in between was sort of a refinement

  • I think of the Internet of Things idea.

  • And now over the last handful of years we're seeing more consumer facing ideas and concepts

  • and products coming out that I think has regenerated interest in this machine-to-machine communication.

  • So now we're hearing things about the connected car and the connected thermostat and the smart

  • home. So now that the consumer side of things is heating up, we're also asking ourselves

  • from a business perspective: "What is the Internet of Things for a business?" Maybe

  • where you don't have a consumer product or a widget that you sell. Maybe you're a services

  • company or a bank, what does the Internet of Things mean for a business like that, particularly

  • a services company?

  • And so for companies that aren't as consumer facing or product oriented, I think there's

  • more opportunity but more sort of clouds around what the Internet of Things means for business.

  • And I think that anything that we think about, that we estimate, that we operate in, places

  • we work in, people we work with, we think about the effectiveness of those things, the

  • effectiveness of our workplace, the effectiveness of a warehouse, the effectiveness of routes

  • that a truck takes or that a forklift makes. And we make guesses about the right ways to

  • design a workspace or design a logistics path, design a warehouse. And the question is can

  • we use the idea of sensors to collect data about things that we were just guessing about

  • before, that we were estimating, that we were sort of using our gut to design? Can we collect

  • real data about performance of people and places and processes that can give us more

  • insight into optimizing and evolving our designs for the way our business works? And that's

  • what I call the Internet of Business Things. It's not the consumer facing stuff, it's the

  • business stuff.

  • Most of the data we think about from an enterprise perspective is sort of modular, it's transactional,

  • it's a call center call or it's a web transaction or it's a sale or it's a quote or it's a piece

  • of data about a product. But the Internet of Things will be creating streams of data.

  • So one of the analogies is how social media creates streams of data. So we've got tweets

  • and we've got flows on our wall and such that are more streams of information. And so think

  • about a sensor that might be on a door in a warehouse. Every time the door opens the

  • sensor records a door opening, a time of day, a day of the week. Maybe it creates some other

  • ambient information - it records the temperature in the facility or it records how long the

  • door was open or whatever. So these are little bits of data that are happening every time

  • the door is open. And that door might be open a lot of times during an hour or a day or

  • a week or a month, but it's creating these streams of data. And it's not like that one

  • piece of data might be that interesting, but it's the trends and the patterns and things

  • that we're looking for in the data that may be what we're looking for.

  • So I want to know how often is that room used during the morning, the afternoon, certain

  • days of the week, weeks of the month, months of the year, to help me be more efficient

  • about the way I staff people in that office or the temperature or the cooling or the electricity

  • that I feed to that part of my facility. So that data that's created, these streams of

  • data are sets of data that I may not already have a technology platform to process. I don't

  • know how to process streams maybe. So now I have to think about a new architecture,

  • a new way to process a stream of data, not just a stream but maybe I have a hundred facilities

  • that I have these sensors in and they're creating these streams of data. So now I've got a new

  • challenge around data.

  • One of the challenges starts to feed and link into the big data topic. So as I'm collecting

  • these individual sensor data points over hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of sensors

  • every minute or every second, I've now got these parallel streams of data I have to process.

  • And so it's unclear exactly how much data I would want to keep for how long, but it's

  • certainly a new kind of data architecture, and for some companies will be a big data

  • problem because there's going to be a lot of this data for large companies for a lot

  • of sensors and a lot of facilities or a lot of products that they want to track or whatever

  • it is that they want to get more insight into by putting tags or sensors on them. So, to

  • me this is one of the sort of subsets, subdomains of big data around sensor data, streams of

  • data that we're going to have to think about new architectures and new designs of and new

  • technologies for capturing them, storing them, processing them, abrogating them, analyzing

  • them and so on. So I think it's going to be a real interesting evolution to see how the

  • big data technologies and technologies in general are emerging to deal with streams

  • of sensor data.

The Internet of Things is an idea that's been around for maybe 10 or 15 years or so. And

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