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Transforming to an IoT Business
The majority of people are familiar with theInternet of Things (IoT), which was first coined in 1985 and was born according to Cisco Systems in 2008 when more things were connected to the internet than people. In practical terms, IoT is defined as physical objects that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the internet. Now, IoT is ubiquitous, especially in the consumer market, where home automation/monitoring is now quite common. As of 2020, there were over 12 billion connected devices with a forecast of more than 30.9 billion IoT devices worldwide by 2025 (source:Business Insider, IoT Analytics, Gartner, Intel, Statista). There were 5.8 billion connected automotive and enterprise IoT devices by the end of 2020, and it is expected that more than 15 billion enterprise IoT devices will be connected by 2029 (source:Gartner), which is why enterprise IoT is the focus of this book. While over 98% of business leaders have an understanding of IoT, statistics show that many are unclear of the exact definition of the term (source:Fierce Electronics), which undermines the full potential of enterprise IoT solutions and is the reason we decided to write this book. The enterprise market is where IoT is making the biggest impact in terms of digital transformation, with operational cost savings and new business models. By the end of this chapter, you will have a good understanding of the underlying IoT solution technologies and markets, as well as how IoT solutions can be used to transform a business with operational cost savings, improved efficiencies, and newbusiness models.
In this chapter, we will cover the followingmain topics:
- UnderstandingIoT technologies
- Leveraging IoT fordigital transformation
- Discovering the topIoT markets
Understanding IoT technologies
In this section, you will learn about the underlying IoT technologies while using a high-level IoT solution end-to-end architecture as a guide. This includes IoT devices, connectivity, data analytics, and applications. The goal of this section is to provide you with a practical understanding of an IoT solution that will form the basis for an enterprise’s digital transformation, as discussed in thenext section.
At a high level, an IoT solution consists of four basic layers, as shown in thefollowing figure:
Figure 1.1 – High-level IoT architecture
Thedevice layer is the actual physical device orthing in IoT that is connected to the internet. It captures critical IoT sensor data such as temperature, humidity, light, and air quality for remote monitoring applications. We will explore IoT devices in more detail i