Internet of Things(IoT) and the Cloud - Part 1

Over the past couple of years, I have drafted, updated, deleted and revisited a post on Internet of Things (IoT). The reason I never published it was that it didn't feel like compelling enough. There are a ton of very good articles and books on the paradigm of Internet of Things. A few months ago, it struck me that there was one area of IoT that was getting a lot of traction over the past year and will continue to do so - the impact of IoT on cloud. Now the cloud here is not just plain storage - it is data storage and the data analysis part of the cloud paradigm that will see a big shift as more Internet enabled end points get turned on. In a series of posts on this topic, we will look at how the growing IoT environment is powering a new area of growth for the cloud business.A really short introduction to IoTFor those who are not familiar with Internet of Things (IoT) or Machine to Machine Communications (M2M) as it is occasionally referred to, here is a simple introduction. With the growing pervasiveness of ubiquitous wifi, Bluetooth LE and cellular communications, there is an opportunity to connect everything, everywhere. Throw in the availability of very low cost miniaturized sensors that can be put on anything and we have the potential opportunity to collect data everywhere and then upload it to an Internet connected server. This data can then be processed and used for a multitude of things from decision making to visualization to simple storage. This complete opportunity is termed as Internet of Things or Internet of Everything.Why now?IoT has existed for a long time. It has just gotten traction over the past few years with sensors getting smaller and cheaper and connectivity becoming less of a hassle (still a challenge though). And with the Cloud infrastructure literally exploding, the cost to store and process the terabytes and petabytes of sensor data just got dramatically cheaper. Coupled with a growing appetite for data analysis and decision making, IoT has its moment in the Sun right now.A Simple UsecaseConsider the following scenario. Let us say the city of Austin, TX would like to implement a dynamic parking fee charging/metering system that has surge pricing based on real-time parking spot use data. To implement this system, they need to build the intelligence into the parking meters to understand current utilization across a geographical area, make pricing decisions based on that and then display that pricing information to the customer. It will then have to adjust the price by sensing if the motorist continues to park his/her vehicle in the same or different spot.A setup like this can be made possible by having a mesh network based parking meter system that communicate with each other on utilization and also with a backend service that deploys specific pricing structure at that time. Sensors can be used to track if the car is still on the spot and adjust pricing as the hours go by. The data thus collected over periods of time can be processed to make better decisions on future pricing.If you think this sounds rather complex, it is. But it is also a great usecase for how the combination of IoT, cloud infrastructure, connectivity and data analytics can transform simple use cases to revenue generators for a city or township. It can also be tweaked constantly to make the right pricing decisions that are acceptable to the motorist while maximizing revenue for the city.The PlayersThe IoT space has seen the likes of really small to really big players. The arrival of the Arduino and Raspberry Pi open source platforms has allowed small scale players like Exosite to compete in this space with the biggies like Intel who offer business class IoT solutions built on the same open source ideas and supported by industry partners. Just having a bunch of connectivity enabled hardware with a data storage option does not make a full scale solution. For a compelling full stack offering, we need a backend cloud service that integrates well with all kinds of data but more importantly, offer compute and query capabilities and analytics dashboards for decision making.The key cloud players who are courting the burgeoning IoT business are:Google with Google Compute EngineMicrosoft Azure Intelligent Systems ServiceAmazon Web Services Kinesisand more.In the coming weeks, we will look into these offerings in greater detail and understand how they uniquely support and enhance the IoT story.