IoE – Boosting operational efficiencies, productivity, and reducing overall costs

IoT (Internet of Things) is a network of physical objects, devices, vehicles, buildings and other items which are embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and most importantly, connectivity, which enables these objects to collect and exchange data. It is just a matter of time as IoT becomes all-encompassing to make a natural transition to Internet of Everything a.k.a. IoE. Needless to say, the consumer segment of IoE looks very impressive. But how are other industries responding to this trend? Cisco predicts that IoE will create $14.4 trillion of ‘Value at Stake’ for companies and industries by 2022. So the number says it all. Which means industries that are looking at connected and smarter devices for automation, innovative production, and acute maintenance will get a pie of the estimated $14.4 trillion in terms of productivity and operational efficiencies. Fair deal! What powers them all? Or rather what makes machines smarter? Thanks to the emergence of dynamic sensors and processors with high compute efficiencies. Technology frontrunners such as Intel, NVidia, Qualcomm, etc. are competing among themselves with the best in breed applications processors like Atom, Terga, Snapdragon, etc., which are capable of disrupting all the conventional notions of connected industrial systems. Some of their featured characteristics include:

• Superior performance
• Energy efficiency for longer battery life
• Rich multimedia support
• Advanced heterogeneous computing and multitasking
• Brilliant graphics support, and
• Smaller/customizable form factors

So, what gives an upper hand to those adopting IoE into their businesses? One of the most compelling advantages is the access to real time data that these powerful sensors and edge-devices offer. It of course doesn’t stop right there—simply having access to volumes of real-time data is only the tip of the iceberg. The real value-add comes from analytics and the ability to glean meaningful and actionable data. Increasingly, we are seeing distributed computing resources all the way from the edge-of-the network to the cloud (and everything in between). At the same time, IoE systems developers are burdened with trading off compute power, connectivity costs (to upload boatloads of data to the cloud for analytics), form-factor, and power consumption. As a result, it will help developers in being proactive about addressing such constraints from the get go based on a target IoE application. Time and resources spent on identifying problems could be better utilized for actual problem solving. Furthermore, enabling machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is opening up a whole new area of IoE devices in industrial automation. Data gathered from such platforms and resulting analytics is leading to tremendous improvements to workflow optimizations. Above all, IoE will make employees smarter with better equipment, faster processes, and meaningful/actionable data. Planning your next IoE product? Stay tuned for the upcoming eBook from Inforce to learn top five tips to minimize your time-to-market. #InforceInspired Image courtesy - www.metering.com