Over the years, cloud has come out of the hype zone and is increasingly impacting our society: first by converging independent business domains like energy, retail and home users, and now by converging technologies like electronics and internet into inseparable Internet of Things.
Cloud brings down the cost of entry into a space which was available only to the elite corporate businesses earlier. This opens up vistas of opportunities for start-ups and small businesses (the long tail) which democratizes the whole business and its optimized processes. It also provides the enhanced analytics to these new businesses that can now fine tune their approach to new markets. Consumers in turn can expect better personalized services and premium products at much lower costs due to economies of scale. New innovative products can now be launched into market with a predefined “stop-loss”. If new businesses have to fail they can and limit their losses quickly with little to no liabilities and move over to new innovations and investments.
Cloud and the Internet of Things
IoT-Cloud additionally provides real or near real time data and events which were never earlier visible in the context. Manufacturers, for example, can now put experimental technology into the new products/devices and get real time feedback not only from the beta participants, but directly from the devices those prospective customers use. They can decide what to change and what to fine-tune during the beta period of the experimental product. So, faster cycles to error correction through Hit-and-Trial can result in better performing products, crafted and better suited for a particular market. On top of it, with Over the Air (OTA) cloud updates for the experimental sensors or with Mechanic Visit Requests to the beta users they may fine-tune the experimental technology to immediately fix for better personalized performance. All this minimizes R&D costs and improves the Voice of Customer (VoC) scores, leading to improved engagement and involvement with the beta customers, and an increase in customer faith in the new upcoming product. As a result, customers showcase the new technology to others that he is likely to adopt. To have well informed, aware and established market months before the actual launch of the product is any business’ dream come true. All this without spending many marketing dollars, all within the R&D budgets!
Enhancing User Experience with an IoT-Cloud based architecture
During the service life of an IoT-Cloud architecture enabled product the behavioral patterns of sensor-data-usage for monitoring and control can ease the life of an IoT user. Better rated patterns can be marked for automated, over-the-air updates. This ensures that a normal IoT user can benefit from the patterns repeatedly used by an experienced user under the shared context. This raises the user experience of the IoT devices in return of the anonymous data shared over the cloud. The continuous stream of sensor data flowing to the cloud ensures benefits of network effects and better analytics flow to the intended users and opens up unplanned, un-designed, unseen new business opportunities. Gamifying an IoT System can help both businesses and users to benefit each other and ensure healthy adoption patterns and building big applications for recombinant devices.
The vast number of applications available to web and mobile users especially the cloud micro-services may be re-used and expanded by IoT enabled systems using the technologies like MQTT resulting into smart Big Applications. Binding APIs with delegated Auth models like OAuth gives smart recombinant devices resulting in the true Internet of Things. This can enable us to transcend from the silo-ed world of connected devices to take advantage of network thinking. This will not only increase the number of nodes connected to each other deeply at API and Auth level but also increase the value we can derive from the resulting Internet of Things.
IoT systems: A Complex Combination of Web, App and Embedded Systems
The high constrained systems of Things with constrained battery, constrained memory, constrained processing power meets the Internet (cloud) systems which come from the world of abundance. Cloud provides unlimited storage, unlimited on-demand processing power, and huge bandwidth to IoT systems at an unbelievably low cost of entry along with low subscription based recurring cost models of unlimited network effects!
Unstructured data streams may be analyzed over economical cloud to bring back Network Effect benefits for the whole society while keeping the cost of purchasing and maintaining billions of IoT sensors low. With the increase in number of devices per user and decrease in the diameter of Internet of Things (remember the graph theory- 6 degrees of separation realm) the nearness of the consumer to the producer decreases, thus bettering the responsiveness and usefulness of the entire automated behavioral system. This increases its potential of adoption by Home users and opens up business access to usage patterns which may hence be converted into informed consumption patterns and thus just-in-time manufacturing (and zero inventory) of more and personalized products.
Smarter Connected Humanity can thus not only save but also improve its collective functioning and community lifestyle!
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