When the World Wide Web
exploded onto the scene in the 1990s and became a
household word, the internet was viewed as the Internet of People – a new tool to access information or to simply communicate with one another. However, that internet of people is now going through a monumental transformation and becoming an Internet of Things (IoT) – a network of tens or even hundreds of billions of smart devices and sensors in which each member has a unique identifier such as an IP address, can gather meaningful data around its environment, and then send that data over the internet without requiring human intervention.
The Market
So how big is the IoT market and who is getting into the game? IDC estimates1 that the IoT market will grow to be $1.7 trillion (not a typo!) by 2020 when there could be more than 30 billion connected “things”. The potential is so huge that companies across every imaginable sector are jumping head-first into IoT. Cloud platform vendors obviously see a huge opportunity, since all the data from the billions of devices add up to vast amounts of storage requirements. Software vendors focusing on big data, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and real-time analytics are in big demand to help companies make smart and quick decisions using the deluge of data. Creative hardware companies are making incredibly tiny devices and sensors that make it all possible. Let’s take a look at a few examples of some contemporary IoT companies and products.
Examples of IoT Companies and Products
Consider Fitbit, a popular wearable device with 10 million active users. It can continuously gather data, store it and seamlessly sync it – when a connection is available – with more capable devices such as smartphones. From there, the data is sent to the cloud which can be accessed by the user anytime, anywhere. One of the requirements of IoT is low-power wireless communication between devices within short distances, since many devices and sensors are very small and thus don’t have enough battery or electrical power. The wearable market’s potential is quickly expanding into smart clothes2, smart shoes2 and more.
Demand for smart home devices is also rapidly increasing, with about sixty million households in America ready to embrace this new way of living3. Among these devices, smart thermostats and security devices are thought to grab the lion share of the market. If you are wondering what other smart devices and appliances can be sold for a home, consider the fact that connected toothbrush is already a reality4!
Read the top reasons to choose EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) as your IoT cloud storage platform.
Healthcare is another area where IoT has been eagerly adopted, and the market segment is estimated to hit more than $100 billion in the next five years5. Examples in this vertical include smart pill dispensers that remind patients when to take which pills and also automatically reorder the prescription. There are even ingestible smart pills that ensure that the patient actually took the medicine! When a patient swallows the pill, it sends a notification to a battery-powered wearable patch on the patient’s body which then sends the information to a smartphone6.
Industrial IoT (IIoT) is another hot topic that integrates IoT, big data, machine learning and machine to machine (M2M) communication. IIoT is considered an essential part of Industry 4.0, otherwise dubbed as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution7.”
IoT is a huge opportunity which changes the game by leveling the field for new entrants to disrupt and take share from long established leaders. The theme of digital driven market is “Disrupt or be Disrupted”. That’s where EMC comes in – EMC has been the leader in data and information infrastructure management for over the past two decades. With the explosion of IoT data being created, organizations need an enormous amount of processing and capacity to stay ahead of the competitive curve. With Elastic Cloud Storage, EMC provides a cost competitive cloud scale solution which delivers superior agility and object storage performance. Learn how a winning IoT strategy starts with ECS cloud storage. Check out the video below to see how ECS can ready your organization for the wave of the Internet of Things.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwpCCAbKn4A”]
Try ECS today for free for non-production use by visiting www.emc.com/getecs.