THE INTERNET OF THINGS. A 10 th Magnitude Orange Paper

Transcription

1 THE INTERNET OF THINGS

2 Defining IoT There is no standard definition of IoT, but Microsoft does a great job of clarifying the concept of IoT by dividing it into into four areas: 1. Things - Physical things such as line of business assets including industry devices or sensors all the things that matter most to the business 2. Connectivity - Those things have connectivity to the internet, to each other and to people, whether directly or through gateways 3. Data - Those things collect and communicate data this may include information gathered from the environment or input by users 4. Analytics - Finally, performing analytics on all the gathered data enables people or machines to add value to the business IoT Benefits Simplified The discussion around IoT can be simplified by thinking about its benefits as falling into four primary categories. Which category is most meaningful for your business? Connect Devices Faster Data Aggregation Optimize Existing Services Improve Customer Satisfaction, Increase Revenue Enable New Success Increase Revenue Improve Operations Reduce Cost, Improve Efficiency IoT Adoption Trends According to its January 2016 TechRadar report on IoT, Forrester says that IoT is a business-led trend with 23% of companies currently using IoT, with another 29% planning to do so within 12 months The manufacturing industry was the top adopter of IoT in 2015 with 307 million installed IoT devices, according to Gartner A 2015 IDC survey of IT decision makers found that 58% consider IoT to be a strategic initiative and 24% view it as transformative 2

3 Top 7 IoT Project Categories Any IoT project needs to start with the business goal in mind. Here are the top seven IoT project types that 10th Magnitude sees among our customers and the value they deliver for the business. IoT Project Category Which Industries Benefit Most? The Value That IoT Delivers Predictive Maintenance Detect and fix equipment problems before they happen Smart Field Services Empower field personnel to deliver better service Intelligent Defense Prevent and address security and safety issues in real time Smarter & Cleaner Cities Improve effectiveness and reduce cost of municipal services Engineering Building Management Construction Field Maintenance Consumer Product Public Safety Field Maintenance Government Services Improve experience and reduce cost by predicting maintenance needs, proactively scheduling repair and automating operational improvement. Derive better or more service from each asset. Improve service provider, device and service outcomes. Educate and monitor operators based on aggregated usage patterns to conserve resources, extend device lifetime and guide operational improvement. Improve public and personal safety by detecting environmental and offender variables. Automate level of force variables to match the situation. Record and track usage. Improve cost effectiveness of municipal services through usage telemetry and location aggregation. Merge municipality and third party data to identify new approaches to public service execution. Fluid Monitoring & Conservation Prevent leakage, loss and bottlenecks Oil & Gas Chemical Water Pipeline Create supply chain visibility. Detect leakage, fluid loss, and bottlenecks in pipeline / distribution. Monitor flow, velocity and volume of fluids. Logistics Improve efficiency and increase speed of package/asset movement Field Detection Detect and track vehicles and other assets in motion Shipping Logistics Public Safety Insurance Improve logistics and supply chain visibility through the integration of warehouse, transport, parcel, package and third-party postal data. Predict, influence and inform package movement, timelines and cost. Improve law enforcement, insurance, and asset recovery effectiveness by detecting and tracking public license plate data with GPS. Enable additional proprietary intelligence related to public data and GPS coordinates 3

4 Six Steps To IoT Project Success IoT success is within reach if your organization follows a process that starts with identifying the business goal and then takes advantage of cloud features to implement and manage the supporting technology: 1. Identify IoT Opportunity The first step is to identify the potential value of IoT for the organization and select a target business goal. The previous Top 7 IoT Project Categories offers some ideas. To identify quick wins, ask: Where could we get a 1% increase in revenue or a 1% reduction in cost from IoT? 2. Assess IoT Readiness Examine existing IoT technical capabilities across four dimensions: devices, connectivity, data and analytics. Identify gaps that need to be filled and choose the right solution to fill those gaps. 3. Demonstrate IoT Value Execute a proof of concept to ensure that the chosen solution can deliver the anticipated return on investment. 4. Enable LOB Applications Once the proof of concept has demonstrated success, integrate the IoT solution with the line of business and business intelligence applications that are needed to enable full implementation. 5. Scale to Production Scale the solution into full production and monitor for needed adjustments. 1. Identify IoT Opportunity 3. Demonstrate IoT Value 5. Scale to Production 2. Assess IoT Readiness 4. Enable LOB Applications 6. Manage Cloud Infrastructure 6. Manage Cloud Infrastructure Maintain and grow the cloud infrastructure used by the IoT solution to accommodate evolving needs. 4

5 How Microsoft Azure Enables IoT 10th Magnitude cloud experts share their views on why Microsoft Azure is the leading cloud platform for IoT The Technology View: The Killer IoT Combo - Azure Event Hubs & Stream Analytics If you want to get started with real-time analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) today, there are two key capabilities you need: the ability to ingest data from your devices and applications; and the ability to do something with that data as it s being ingested. I m talking about things like running real-time queries (i.e., stream queries) that enable data visualization. And, if you really want to take advantage of the power of IoT and analytics, you might even want to trigger application logic based on a stream query. Until now, the on-premises infrastructure required to enable these capabilities was cost-prohibitive for most organizations. Fortunately for everyone eager to get the ball rolling with analytics and IoT, Microsoft has introduced a new combination of cloud services: Event Hubs and Stream Analytics. Event Hubs are part of the Azure Service Bus platform and serve as single point of ingestion to process millions of messages per second. Azure Stream Analytics sits on top of Event Hubs to perform analytics on data in flight. Pricing for these services is based on consumption and data volume, which means that organizations pay only for the computing resources they use. Event Hubs follow the well-established publish-subscribe messaging pattern where senders of messages (publishers) do not communicate directly with the receiver of a message, but with a middleman or a hub (Azure Event Hubs). The final receiver of the message (also called a subscriber) then communicates with the publishers via the middleman. This pattern allows publishers (the multitude of connected and disconnected devices out there) and subscribers (notification engines) to operate without having to be aware of each other. In the complex world of BYOD and proliferating intelligent devices, this publishsubscribe pattern is critical prevention against the disconnect that would otherwise occur between message senders and receivers. Event Hubs enable real-time analytics by serving as the repository for ingested data in flight, retaining data for a specified timeframe that the user sets based on their needs. Azure Stream Analytics can query data in flight to enable real-time action. Or, queries can be set up to collect data to be persisted into a repository such as HDInsight or a SQL database for later use. Azure Stream Analytics is integrated out-of-the-box with Event Hubs, and actually operates on a different paradigm than most BI practitioners are used to working with. In the traditional analytics world, all data is latent because it first has to be written to a database and then read back out. Stream queries perform analytics on the data before it even gets to the database. In order to do this, we have to make the shift from running queries to turning queries on. With Stream Analytics, queries run constantly, watching for conditions to be met. The data meets the logic rather than the logic going out to meet the data. A pipe analogy is a good way to envision how stream queries operate. Imagine the data flowing like water through a pipe (e.g., Event Hubs) and the query as a valve in the pipe that s purposed for analytics and workflow. As the data passes through the query valve, it s constantly being monitored for whether it matches the conditions set by the query. If a match is detected, then a specified workflow is triggered for example, set off an alarm or send an alert. Stream Analytics is also capable of comparing multiple data streams or combining stream data with data from LOB applications. Pairing different analytic workloads can deliver powerful benefits by combining historical insights with real-time data. One of the most critical features of Azure Stream Analytics is that it is a temporal system, meaning it deals with the progress of time in ways that traditional scenarios would deem impossible or too complex to implement. Microsoft s Power BI business intelligence tool offers another avenue for gaining immediate insights from stream queries. Power BI makes it easy to surface data in Azure and can provide real-time visualizations that fit perfectly with the real-time nature of Event Hubs and Stream Analytics. 5

6 The Business View: Fun with IoT In a recent episode of 10th Magnitude s The Manhattans Project video series, VP of Cloud Solutions Brian Blanchard, discussed the ever expanding world of the Internet of Things. What is the Internet of Things? How does Azure empower it and the engineers behind it? Can it ACTUALLY save lives? Here are some highlights from the interview: Q: Can you give us a quick high level on how Azure and IoT are related? What in Azure empowers people to implement IoT projects? A: In my opinion IoT is the next cloud. It s right at the precipice of emerging as a technology and is rapidly changing. What the cloud does to facilitate that, is that there is a collection of tools in Azure called the IoT Hub. That contains service bus, hubs and all these other technical pieces. Essentially what they do is enable this flow of communication from devices in the field to a central location, to some form of business intelligence and then back out to users or the devices themselves. A great example of that is, let s say that I have a watch that counts how many steps I take. It s great if I can see how many steps I take, but if everybody is wearing a watch and we send all of that data to the cloud, a doctor could take that data and assimilate it. They could find out what patients are most at risk of diabetes due to lack of activity. Who isn t getting enough exercise aligned with medical treatment? And they can see that from a centralized console in Azure as all that data comes together in real time. The power of IoT and what [Azure] enables is that I can get that data from the field to a person who can really assess that data and make sense of it so much faster. Q: You mentioned your 1% theory of IoT earlier. Can you explain what that is? A: The 1% theory is that with IoT, we change a business by changing 1% of gross revenue or 1% of gross margin. So looking at your business, looking out in the field, looking at your customers what is that one thing that if you could change it with IoT, it s going to generate 1% improvement in revenue or 1% improvement in gross margin for you? Q: How do you identify that opportunity for 1% improvement? A: We do that through some processes that we ve developed for interactive assessment and opportunity identification. Yesterday we held a workshop for some technical and business leaders at one of our clients, and we walked through their customers world. We stood in the shoes of their customer, and we said: What do they do that s important? What is it that would change the world for them? What is it about your product that they like? What is it about your product that they hate? Of all those things that are opportunities to improve your product, let s find the one improvement that we can implement with IoT that your customers are willing to pay for tomorrow. Watch the full interview with Brian here: Additional Resources Blog Post: Add Predictive Power to IoT with Azure Machine Learning: More on Microsoft Azure IoT Suite: 10th Magnitude s Two-Week IoT Proof of Concept: Epicenter Video: Azure IoT Hub & Stream Analytics Demo 6