Issue #861
by Ralph Grabowski with Stan Przybylinski
After the Internet transformed commerce, the Internet of Things will do it all over again, says CIMdata's vp of research Stan Przybylinski. IoT is defined as products made smart with sensors that are interconnected. Sensors attached to "everything," however, generates huge amounts of data.
It seems like the Internet gold rush all over again, as "everyone" is getting into the act. Mr Przybylinski provided an image from Morgan Stanley that shows the layers of IoT and some of the firms in each one. (See Figure 1.) ThingWorx is now owned by PTC.
Figure 1 The Internet of Things stack and vendors thereof
PTC, the stalwart CAD firm, is reorienting itself as the IoT company and likes to make it seem that they are the only ones with an IoT solution, but reality is different. They have serious competition. IBM created an entire IoT business unit, and funded it with $3 billion -- that's 2x PTC annual revenues.
With so many companies tipping in their toes, IoT is -- no surprise -- beset by standards; one slide shown by Mr Przybylinski actually needed two slides to list all the standards currently available. As I was writing this article, the headline "Huawei launches [10KB] Lite OS, an operating system for the Internet of Things" popped up on Techmeme's River feed.
Analysis firms are going crazy over IoT, outdoing each other with even bigger numbers.
- Gartner: 26 billion IoT devices and $300 billion service revenue by 2020
- McKinsey: $6.2 trillion economic impact from the IoT industry by 2025
- IDC: 30 billion devices and $7.3 trillion revenue by 2017
- Cisco: 50 billion devices and $19 trillion opportunity by 2020
Getting serious now, what does it take for a thing to be smart? Mr Przybylinski provided a list of items to consider, one that CAD designers can use to determine just how much IoT should be in the widget they're modeling:
- Is it a node with limited intelligence?
- Does it collect and share data?
- Is it part of infrastructure [buildings, roads, power systems]?
- Is it a controller with a user interface?
- Does it communicate with other devices, with the base?
- How much does it do on its own?
ComputerWorld this year asked which new technology that firms would be spending on over the next 12 months. #1 was IoT, then #2 HPC [high performance computing], and last of all energy-saving and carbon-reducing technology -- maybe because priorities #1 and #2 will increase energy consumption.
In CIMdata's own poll, barely more than 10% of attendees at their PLM Forum are today collecting and analyzing data from IoT devices. The other nearly 90% were not interested, interested, or already collecting data but not analyzing it.
Other than PTC, some CAD vendors are trying to sound like they are also into IoT. According to Mr Przybylinski, Dassault is taking about the "fourth industrial revolution"; Siemens PLM is offering a "smart innovation portfolio"; Autodesk is emphasizing "makers" with things like Arduino and PLM 360.
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...article continues.
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Q&A
Q: Who owns the data that is fed back [from IoT devices]?
A: This is a huge issue, because it is not clear. People who own the technical infrastructure that collects the data own the data. But in commercial settings, it not perhaps not possible to allow others to own your data.
Q: Will the number of available IP addresses become a problem with billions and trillions of IoT devices?
A: I think there is enough address space available [through IPv6, which provides for 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses or 3.4×10e38. By comparison, the number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be 4×10e80].
Q: Who is leading the race to analyze the data?
A: IBM, SAS, and a few others. But as shown in the Morgan Stanley report, there are recent entrants like Palantir and Tableau.
Q: Many companies outsource IT departments. Will this be a problem for implementing IoT?
A: They primarily outsource software development and business IT. But outsourcing software will be problematic. This is why PTC's moves are so powerful: the companies they acquired already figured out how to do IoT.
Q: Do you know of any standards body working on standards for consumer IoT?
A: There are several potentially competing groups: AllSeen Alliance, Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC), the Thread Group, and others. This will take a few years to play out.
Q: What is the business case for IoT?
A: The impracticality of continuing to do things like in the past. For example, a gambling company used to update their machines manually. They now want to connect them so that machines can be updated remotely, as well as receive feedback from how they are being used.
Q: PLM takes a long time to deploy. How can fast-moving IoT work with it?
A: To us, PLM is a strategy of how to implement technology. Companies were implementing PLM long before the term came into use. A lot of IoT is embodied in tools and frameworks that support creating IoT applications with little coding. For many, the tools they need are already written, so it is just a matter of implementing them.
Q: What are some early success stories?
A: The whole fitness industry is a prime example. Many people use these devices, or their smartphones to monitor their wellbeing. Nest also has done well.
Q: How can we be sure that all this data is not being misused?
A: We do things in the USA because we can, not because we should. And so we don't figure out the negative aspects before we go ahead and do them. Misuse of data will have to be an agreement between participants. But we don't read agreements when we sign up for things, and so this is a role for government to protect us.
www.cimdata.com |
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| OMG (Object Management Group) is a not-for-profit technology standards consortium that's developing modeling standards, such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Model Driven Architecture (MDA). www.omg.org |
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Read the blog at WorldCAD Access as I write more about the CAD industry, and give tips on using hardware and software. You can keep up with the blog through RSS feeds and email alerts.
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Re: The Development of HP's PageWide Printhead
Issue #858 stated “today the heads can span paper as wide as 110" (9'2" or 4.3m).” Maybe those were mini-meters.
In regular meters, 110" is closer to 2.8m. Yesterday, I was installing 3- and 4-meter subwoofer cables, being acutely aware of what I needed for spans of 9 and 13 feet.
- Steve Wells, president
Conceptworks
The editor replies: You are right. I had divided by 2.54 instead of multiplying. Even though we here in Canada are metric officially, just about all everyday commerce is still imperial -- groceries, lumber, stationary -- even after 30 years following the changeover.
Business Week told me to retire in 2005, and I haven't considered writing about CAD since then, so I likely never will again. But upFront was long a helpful crutch. Thanks
- O.B.
I am retired. Thanks for all the information of the past.
- Y.A. |
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