The Internet of Things Comes of Age

3 June 2021

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The term was first coined in 1999, it seems, by a British Technologist working for Procter & Gamble, although the concept on which IoT is based goes back a little further and to a very practical, problem-solving beginning…and the need for cold drinks!

In 1982, the Internet was in its embryonic form: the ArpaNet, with around 300 computers connected to it.  That’s 300 computers in total, worldwide.  We have to imagine that sat at a desk in Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science Department was a student pondering one of life’s big problems, “When is the optimum time to walk down the hall to the vending machine to get a nice, chilled bottle of coke?”  In his defense, the coke machine was “some way away” and the trick was to get to the vending machine at just the right time. Not so late that the machine was empty, but not so early that the machine had not had time to chill the refilled coke bottles.  To cut the long but entertaining story short, he got together with his student friends, hacked into the coke machine, connected it to the ArpaNet, built an “app” and a physical device was reborn into the very first Cloud – the Internet of Things was off and running!

Of course, before all this, we’d seen “connected intelligence” and machines talking to machines (the first aeroplanes had been sending updates to land-based servers since the 1970’s) but this was the first appliance, maybe the first “unexpected offline device” being remotely monitored.

Since then, our human appetite to connect our “things” to the cloud has exploded.  Research firm Gartner expects that there will be in excess of 64 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2025.  McKinsey calculates that 127 new things connect to the Internet every second!

And what are these “things”?  It’s tempting to dismiss IoT simply as the domain of home automation nerds (I am one) or gadget geeks (I am one of those, too).  Coloured lightbulbs, Internet fridges (I worked on this in 1996, by the way!), smart watches, home weather stations, Internet exercise bikes and so on.  Hobbyist stuff for tinkerers and so called “early adopters”.  A blip on a Gartner Hype Curve.  A short five or ten years ago, that might have been how we thought of this emerging area.  Not so today.  Today, it’s become an industry of its own, a university major of its own, and a career path of its own.  In less than a decade, it has become established.

So, what parts of our professional and personal lives are impacted by IoT?  It’s probably easier to ask where IoT is NOT a consideration.  Years ago, I used to deliver presentations where I would ask “What industries are NOT affected by Software?”.  Today, that challenge can be made regarding Cloud and IoT.

Cities are becoming IoT enabled – cameras, streetlights, traffic signals are more obvious; but more recently, people counters, air quality sensors, humidity monitors and parking monitors are being installed by municipal authorities.  Our cars and trains are connected – we can monitor locations of buses from our phones.  Farmers can remotely control agricultural machines and monitor the temperature and nutritional state of individual cattle during calving season.  IoT devices can be smaller than a penny coin and be integrated into a dog’s collar or even smaller to monitor a human pacemaker.  Staying on the personal theme, we increasingly use devices to capture information about ourselves and share it online – as well as my Internet bike, I daily use IoT bathroom scales, heart monitors, blood pressure monitors and sleep trackers.

And of course, oil pipelines.  The hacking of the Colonial Pipeline oil network that hit the news in recent weeks is a clear reminder of how pervasive IoT has become.  The benefits of being able to remotely monitor and manage oil flow in real time were an obvious driver for IoT in such a physical operation.

Despite the constant battling between IoT providers and hackers, or maybe because of this quest for one-upmanship, this industry has learned a lot since 1999.  It’s moved through the stages of growth from fast learning toddler to carefree (careless?) teenager and to now, the responsible, dependable adult.  In that time, we’ve understood significantly more about the risks around security and privacy.  Regulations, standards and best practice have emerged to help us out.  We’ve learned about scale and capacity, so we build our systems well.  The tools and architectures we use to build Internets of Things are based on an industry gaining and sharing knowledge and populated by professionals with specialised skills in bringing the physical safely into the digital.   It’s had to grow up – IoT is in our houses, on our streets, in our planes, in our cars, in our ATM’s, and in our bodies.  It has access to our financial information, our health status and personal habits.  It has the ability to affect fuel prices.

Glory’s customers are in the business of serving their own customers and our technology solutions are focused on automating that customer experience.  Internet of Things plays a big part in enabling that automated experience.  Our physical in-store and in-branch automation solutions are full of sensors and actuators that enable them to do their job in the physical world: read customers’ faces, move banknotes, count coins and so on.  Glory’s UBIQULARTM IoT platform connects these to an online world to enable new, digital business models such as remote operation, area-based analysis and decision making, real time scheduling of cash replenishment and so on.  Clearly it requires “responsible adult IoT” to be trusted with such business-critical functions, to manage data and functions securely and reliably between the physical and digital worlds.

Glory’s UBIQULAR IoT solutions are grounded in two essential principles.  The decades of experience we have in building secure, high quality precision solutions and a commitment to excellence, and service.  That principle pervades our engineering ethos at Glory, and into our IoT architectures and approach.  But keeping up with a rapidly growing industry means learning from other sectors too, and our second principle is to have valued partnerships with experts in this field, leveraging their billions of dollars of R&D and applying the learnings of maybe more critical areas such as aerospace, healthcare and, yes, oil pipeline management.

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