Forbes: How The Internet Of Things Will Change Almost Everything

John Humphreys is VP-marketing for Egenera, provider of cloud management software.

John Humphreys

If you think the digital world is crowded now, wait to you see what the next few years will bring. Today, there are roughly two Internet-connected devices for every man, woman and child on the planet. By 2025, analysts are forecasting that this ratio will rise past six. This means we can expect to grow to nearly 50 billion Internet-connected devices in the next decade.

Once you digest the sheer size of that number and the tactical challenges of connecting and dealing with all those devices (thank you IPv6), the first question most people want to know is what are all these devices doing and for what end?

A Nervous System for the Planet

Over the next decade, most of the connected device growth will come from very small sensors that are primarily doing machine-to-machine communications and acting as the digital nerve endings for highly dynamic global sense-and-respond systems.

Driven by a revolution in cheap sensor technology, we have, for the first time, the ability to impart a central nervous system on our planet. This fabric of technology will allow us to measure systems on a global scale and at the same time offer a never before seen resolution.

This capability to bring the big picture into sharp focus enables us to provide a real-time digital representation of our constantly changing world. This is the first step in a journey to explain the world will live in, our role in it and our impact upon it. This promise is what makes us all so excited about these sensor networks. If successful, they will help us solve some of the biggest problems facing our society.

The Push for Detail

One of the mega-trends playing out over the century has been the drive for details, and with that comes increased knowledge and levels of specialization. This trend can be seen playing out across multiple industries.

In medicine for example, doctors today have gone beyond specializing in a specific system of the body, but rather are hyper-focused on just one specific aspect of one part of that system. The end game in healthcare is personalized medicine facilitated by genomic research, which will someday allow us to create customized medications for individual patients. Another example of this trend is how our ability to capture an ever more detailed picture of the physical world has transformed the energy industry.

In the early days of oil and gas exploration, geologists would largely rely upon topology at the surface of the earth to interpret the location of oil and gas accumulations in the subsurface. Today, geologists can not only create – from seismic imaging – detailed 3D images of the subsurface but also can differentiate whether the fluids in the rocks are oil, gas or water. This capability, combined with technological advances in drilling, have lead to a revolution in energy and put the U.S. back on a path towards energy security.

A third example of this specialization and precision can be found in a BBC report I recently stumbled across. This report centers on how researchers in Arizona are now able to map carbon emissions at street level in real time in cities around the globe. Think of the implications. With this ability we can now identify, in 3D space and 4D time, the most offending sources of carbon in order to plug this holes and slow the pace of climate change.

From the medical world to oil and gas to the environmental movement, it is clear that this trend will continue to grow and shape society in even more ways than it already has. But with more detail and specialization comes a huge influx of data that has to be collected and analyzed – which requires the right technology to manage, scale and organize that data.

The Role of the Cloud

If all of these sensors act as the central nervous system for the planet, then the cloud is the brain. It’s the place where all the data flooding in will be collected, collated, analyzed and turned into information and that information turned into knowledge.

In a world containing vast arrays of constantly changing sensors, the challenges for the cloud include scale of operations and rate of change. Whether it’s for a social network, a scientific study or for resource optimizations, a key characteristic of the Internet of things (IoT) is its massive scale and self-organizing nature.

In physics, chemistry and biology, the idea of self-organization is well documented. Applied to the IoT, self-organizing networks have come to mean the temporary formation of a network in order to collect specific information or measure a specific phenomenon.

The challenge is the temporary nature of the network. As such the next generation of the cloud will need to malleable enough to scale autonomously, adaptive enough to handle constantly changing connections and resilient enough to stand up to the huge ebbs and flows in data that will occur. To meet this challenge, cloud computing will need to accelerate its evolution and rapidly move past its current form.

The Benefits for People, Business and Resources

How will all of these affect us as individuals? From a consumer stand point, an IoT will drive market fragmentation as organizations paint an ever more accurate picture of our world, customizing their products and services to every hyper-specific market segments. Over the next decade, the result will be more customized goods and services, delivered at a lower cost and through ever more sustainable methods.

The IoT will also help us optimize our planet. As noted above, the ability to measure, in real time, sources of carbon goes a long way in helping us stop the emissions. The same holds true for any scarce resource. This optimization is not only for natural resources or systems, but also for manmade ones as well. Just imagine how much real time information can provide value in highly distributed and loosely connected supply chains of today’s massive organizations.

We are really only just scratching the surface. To date, the application of these technologies has been relegated to the realm of science and medicine. We haven’t even begun to apply these technologies in the industrial industry, let alone consumer products market. However, their time is coming. Everyone from Coca-Cola to the City of Boston are looking to see how they can leverage the vast supply of cheap communicative technology.

As we transition into the age where the accessibility of connected sensor devices becomes available, the opportunities for optimizing global systems seem almost endless. From smarter power distribution, to more efficient cities, to digital battlefields, to self-optimizing supply chains, to hyper-targeted products, it all seems possible and the world seems poised to make deep inroads into smart and sustainable development.

 read more at http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/12/17/how-the-internet-of-things-will-change-almost-everything/2/