Apple’s rare pre-announcement of its grand foray into wearable technology puts the spotlight on the significance of developer communities in the next frontier of Internet of Things. While the blitz of sensor connectivity peaked IoT in Gartner’s hype-cycle, a wider wave of developer community led applications is expected to tide it across the chasms in the adoption curve. Keeping this in mind, Apple’s unusual lead-time of 4+ months before the actual launch has been designed to ease developers into a multi-tier architecture (Watch – iPhone – iCloud) characteristic of most IoT infrastructures.
As Apple, Google & Samsung battle the consumer IoT markets (like health & home-automation), swaths of use-cases in manufacturing, oil & gas, retail and building-management face application development challenges like lack of standards, data volumes & variety, security and closed developer communities. Sometimes dubbed as Industrial Revolution 4.0, applications are expected to overlay “smart”-ness on connected “Things” and bring unprecedented availability, efficiency and safety in operations. This Internet of Applications needs the interoperability and scalability of mobile-app marketplaces to become viable. Investments in core IoT infrastructure by giants like Cisco, Intel & Qualcomm have created the right timing for Internet of Applications. The stage has been set for the shared marketplace economies to kick-in with quick time-to-market, consistent quality and viable costs.
With no dearth of possible applications across visualization, machine-learning based anomaly detection and analytics for operations & maintenance, factories await Internet of Things to turn into Internet of Applications – the promised frontier beyond its hype-cycle.
Learn more about the same in the upcoming event on Software Defined Factories in Mountain View, CA on Thursday, October 9, 2014.
–Kamesh Raghavendra, Vice President at The Hive
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