By Brad Surak, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Hitachi Vantara
Although the hype around the internet of things (IoT) can make it sound like a completely new technology market or product category, this isn’t the case. IoT is actually an architectural shift that places new requirements on existing IT and operational technology (OT) capabilities and product categories. It’s making new demands on network connectivity, data aggregation and integration, information and operations management, visualization, application development, systems management, security and governance, and more.
Granted, the technologies required to implement IoT solutions are considerably more extensive than those found in today's off-the-shelf IoT platforms – cloud or otherwise. You’ll run into trouble if you think that all you need to do is buy an IoT platform, install it, and build apps on it. That just creates one more data silo. To generate real value with IoT, the most (perhaps the only) effective approach is to incorporate it into your existing data infrastructure.
Data integration is critical to IoT success. According to McKinsey, “Interoperability is required for 40 percent of potential value across IoT applications and nearly 60 percent in some settings.” And Gartner predicted that half of the cost of implementing IoT solutions will be spent on integrating various IoT components with each other and with back-end systems. Sounds easier said than done, right?
The good news is that IoT – the architectural disruption – is actually a natural evolution of your enterprise architecture out to the edge.
Vendors today are racing to make their solutions IoT-ready. But early attempts to consolidate the capabilities required for developing, deploying and managing IoT applications have fallen short and are likely to continue to do so. Why? Because they invariably become silos for operational data. The strategy needs to be outcome driven rather than technology driven. The desired outcome determines what data you need, regardless of whether the outcome originated in IT or OT. Then you evolve your infrastructure to incorporate that data into your data architecture.
According to Harbor Research, the next step in the convergence of IT and OT will be “completely fluid information and fully interoperating devices, data, people and systems.” This will require an infrastructure that will make information and applications more portable across both physical and logical systems. In other words, it will require a more open and distributed data and computing capability that spans a continuum from edge to cloud.
The competitive advantage will shift to those organizations that can make better decisions in real time across both their traditional and emerging business and operations applications and their physical operations, each informed by context from the other.
What it comes down to is this; IoT is all about data and the business outcomes that data generates – and data integration is key. Incorporating IoT into your enterprise architecture should build on the investments you've already made. It should extend your architecture out to the edge. As IoT goes mainstream, vertically integrated IoT platforms are likely to give way to a more flexible and modern distributed computing architecture. When outcomes drive business strategies, companies that have embraced the architectural disruption that is IoT will benefit from data fluidity and application portability across their domains.
As the hype around IoT continues, remember, IoT is not a product category but an architectural disruption.
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