RR Bipin, VP, Digital Services – IoT, Embedded Product Design Division, Tata Elxsi, says the ability to track products in use makes it possible to respond to consumer behavior in an easier and quicker way.
Products can now be connected with other products, leading to new analytics and new services for more effective forecasting, process optimization, and customer service experiences. This opens up new possibilities for IoT based value creation. Also, making money in the connected space is not limited to physical product sales; other revenue streams become possible after the initial product sale, including value-added services, subscriptions, and apps, which can easily exceed the initial purchase price thus creating recurring revenue. There is also an option of locking in customers using IoT by increasing the amount of personalization offered.
Challenges in IoT adoption
Enterprise CIOs should note that due to various challenges like internet availability, bandwidth, cost of IoT enabled devices (products such as wearable fitness bands are yet to take off in India, and price is a key reason and Indian consumers are very selective in terms of where they would invest when it comes to technology) consumer adoption in India will be slow.
However, with the new government coming out with an IoT policy, and the stated plans of developing smart cities, there is significant scope for growth of IoT in multiple government and utility services. This would bring in use cases like connected care and connected vehicles. Also, In the energy and utilities sector, there are segments such the state electricity boards, transmission and distribution companies, and private power producers that are adopting smart grid technology, not only to manage power supply and demand, but also to study customers’ power usage behavior.
Automotive Industry
220 Million Connected Cars on the Road in 2020
By 2020, data connectivity in passenger vehicles will be available in 70 percent of new vehicle models in mature automotive markets, up from 25 percent in 2013.
By 2020, 60 percent of vehicle buyers in mature markets will find connected-vehicle innovations equal to or more critical in their buying decision than the vehicle’s mechanical engineering capabilities.
The use cases that will drive adoption include consumer infotainment, pay-as-you-go insurance, remote diagnostics, emergency response and fleet tracking.
Home Automation
Increasing penetration of portable devices
Rapid growth in connectivity: Technologies allowing devices to talk with each other
Reducing cost of intelligent sensors and actuators making smart homes affordable
Convergent experience on devices
Demand for real-time monitoring and remote management via mobility access Enhanced internet connectivity in developed economies such as U.S. Japan, UK, Germany, France, etc. is driving demand for home automation systems.
APAC region is projected to be the largest market for Industrial internet of things, by 2020.
Within APAC, China held the largest market share for IoT, whereas India is expected to grow at the highest CAGR among all the major markets.
Factors which are driving the IoT market include technological advancements in semiconductor and electronics, evolution of cloud computing technologies, standardization of IPv6, and support from governments all over the world.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing sector is witnessing a transformation through the implementation of the smart factory concept and factory automation technologies.
Government initiatives such as Industry 4.0 in Germany and Plan Industry in France are expected to drive the IoT solutions in Europe
Telehealth
The increasing number of connected medical devices and the proliferation of smartphones has contributed significantly to the rise of IoT.
The reduced cost of care, improved healthcare outcomes, and development of high speed networking technologies are likely to drive the growth of IoT in healthcare.
The systems and software segment is expected to witness the highest growth, owing to the increasing number of applications and the widespread adoption of cloud computing across healthcare organizations.
Smart city
In India, the largest talked about classical IoT use case is smart cities. Our cities have reached a break point where basic needs itself are under threat. There is a compelling need for something smarter. A smart city is the largest topic, which is being discussed as an IoT application. It is a beautiful aggregation of connectivity technologies and a lot of areas that we focus on like connected cars, industrial automation, fleet and logistics. The leverage of an underlying platform that can help otherwise discrete systems to seamlessly talk to each other is key to its success. Like how a city is evolved to what it is by the investment and thought of multiple stakeholder, a smart city would be an evolving aggregation of the ideas and contributions of its stakeholders adhering to standards of interoperability.
Connected Care
Broadly known as telehealth is the evolving space of connected care. Connected care is going to be a huge area for India especially because there are large amount of our doctors and facilities that are centered on urban centers. One of the primary drivers, other than employment, for migration of labor and people is healthcare. The opportunity to have that healthcare available remotely and systems that can access health care facilities is a huge opportunity. If you look at it, all of this actually comes under the ambit of smart cities in one form or another. Smart cities are a more thematic amalgamation of the fundamental technologies that are offered by these verticals, which actually brings them together.
Future of IoT
India has tremendous potential to adopt and mature itself for IoT. By 2020 Government of India plans to create US$15 billion IoT industry for India. If this will be the way forward, then number of connected devices in India will reach to 2.7 billion by 2020 from the existing 200 million.
IoT standardization
Interoperability is a key requirement for the success of any solution in the market.
Systems must be “future-proof”, i.e. grow and adapt with the changing needs of the user over time.
There is a very large variety of user need among different sections of the society.
And no vendor can offer a “one size fits all” product.
Technology must integrate with local infrastructure and service providers.
Think of sensors, actuators and complete systems as “Lego building blocks” – you want to combine them in different ways.
This is only possible with standardized interfaces between systems and system components.
Standardization bodies like below are working towards forming interoperable standards in general, electro-technology and telecommunications etc:
International – ISO, IEC, ITU
Europe (regional) – CEN, CENELEC, ETSI
India (national) – BIS, TSDSI
ETSI has announced updated oneM2M Release 1 specifications. oneM2M enables interoperability across IoT applications regardless of the underlying technology used. Release 1 has already been used in service provider deployments in Asia, South Korea and Europe Smart City and transport system deployments.
Tata Elxsi helps build next generation products from scratch by bringing in a unique combination of Engineering, Design and Technology. Our IoT cloud platform TETHER complies to latest standards making it a preferred choice of customers and partners in Communication, Medical, Automotive, Semiconductor and Broadcast sectors in the IoT space. In addition, using our cloud platform TETHER companies can reduce time to market, minimize operational costs and generate measurable business outcomes.
RR Bipin, VP, Digital Services – IoT, Embedded Product Design Division, Tata Elxsi
Hi Bipin,
Thanks for the explanation and it was interesting to get the insights of IoT and its scope. However, ROI in IoT has not been justified or signified.