Next week at IoT Evolution World, HARMAN, a company I’ve been covering for the last year, will be sharing its views on how IoT will significantly change and even disrupt the products, services and support systems for consumer goods. Its worldview hinges on three elements: engaging and functional design, advances in machine learning and predictive analytics, and, of course, cloud.
HARMAN has placed enormous bets on “connected things” driving value for its own products, as well as for others by developing an IoT managed services practice, and even IoT gateways it uses to build “connective tissue” or sell to the DIY network crowd.
In a recent interview with Andrew Till, VP Technology Partnerships and New Solutions, HARMAN Connected Services, we posed a few questions beyond Design, Data and the inevitable cloud, and asked about what IDC (News - Alert) coined “The Third Platform” Social Mobile Analytics Cloud, or SMAC as it is known.
IoT Evolution World: How does social networking intersect with IoT? Is it about messaging between connected things and their “owners” for consumer IoT, for example?
Andrew Till: Social networking has a strong role to play in both consumer and business IoT. One of the keys for IoT is that merging of multiple data sets to create higher level insights that you could never gain by just looking at individual data sets. Social will provide a valuable source of input enabling a better understanding of “context” that is critical for smart IoT systems that make autonomous decisions or to make better recommendations.
Social networking will also be, in many cases, another way in which IoT systems keep users updated or provides alerts and notifications (for example, imagine your personal fitness devices are capable of recognizing that you’re having a heart attack, and then being able to make an emergency call but also making a post on Facebook (News - Alert) so that friends can quickly be information and hopefully come to your aid).
IoTE: Why is mobile so important for IoT? Is the impact going to be as a result of the networks themselves including 3G/4G/LTE (News - Alert)?
AT: Mobile plays a number of key roles in the development of the IoT markets.
It will be one of the main platforms for data transport and because mobile networks are already widely deployed this can be done at comparatively low costs. Simply put without mobile networks many of the compelling IoT use cases could not be delivered.
Mobile also enables real-time interaction with the users of the data, services, solutions provided by IoT. The ability to quickly check the status of the devices in your home, your car, or office and to receive real-time alerts and notifications are already driving the creation of new markets and re-defining existing industries that have been around for 10s and in some cases 100s of years.
IoTE: Where do you see analytics, including AI and AR, enhancing the world of connected things and people?
AT: This is all about helping people to make decisions. AI and AR will provide people with the focused information they need, in real time, to enhance their decision-making capabilities. One of the key recent breakthroughs has been the advancement in contextual understanding enabling analytics systems to provide the user with the right information based on where they are, what they are doing and an understanding of the desired outcome. This avoids scenarios where you overload people and make it more challenging for them to take a decision when they effectively have to decipher the signal from the noise.
IoTE: There is no single cloud, of course. There are public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds and in the case of IoT, fog computing at the edge that can move data into bigger clouds for distributed systems. What is HARMAN’s vision for the multi-cloud world in IoT?
AT: From a HARMAN perspective, we would expect that there will be many clouds moving forwards depending on the type of solution/service being provided and if it’s a consumer, commercial or industrial orientated. We, therefore are developing cloud agnostic solutions that will provide our customers with the freedom to select the right cloud for their needs. Furthermore, we strongly believe and are investing in security as a fundamental building block of cloud services as this will enable stronger sharing of data sets between clouds thus enable better more refined delivery of IoT services.
Later this month, at IoT Evolution World’s Exhibition and Conference, the HARMAN team will be talking about IoT as the new key to consumer expectations and therefore essential to all enterprises, with the number of connected devices potentially reaching 30 billion in 2020, tripling the current estimate of 10 billion.
The emphasis will be on enterprise IoT transformation, and the requirement to look at a digital business through a combination of user experience design (“interactive, engaging and functional design” that elevates a product or service and builds brand loyalty), data and analytics, including autonomous decisions by machines based on user-set policies and preferences) and of course, cloud which makes so much more possible across the connected world.
Is IoT driving the industry beyond IDC’s “Third Platform” into a “Fourth Platform” with even more opportunity? “What’s Next” – what IDC’s own Third Platform initiative is teasing out – is the evolution of very specific, comprehensive industry solutions, which we expect to see highlighted at this month’s exhibition and conference…whether in the sustainable energy, farming, manufacturing, smart home, smart city and smart “everything” world.
We’ll only get there “by design.”