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Sharing IoT data and projects are vital for your growth
Sharing IoT data and projects are vital for your growth

Strategic sharing of IoT data will yield big innovations in related market

Omar Cruz avatar
Written by Omar Cruz
Updated over a week ago

Introduction 

The generated volume of IoT data is projected to transcend our expectations in ways we cannot imagine right now. Projects where large companies are targeting their market, but also the new ones with newly created relationships and joint ventures are giving us the image that IoT market is an interesting one to invest in. As we live in the 4th industrial revolution where information already becomes an "asset" that generate revenues, sharing data is both good for market recognition and building the company's image. 

Market insights

It's good to take a look at insights that Zebra Technologies' (endpoint devices specialists) created for 2019 [1]:

  • Enterprises increased their investments in IoT by 4 % in 2018 over 2017, spending an average of $4.6 million this year,

  • 38 % of enterprises have company-wide IoT deployments in production today,

  • 84 % of enterprises expect to complete their IoT implementations within two years,

  • 82 % of enterprises share information from their IoT solutions with employees in real time or near real time.

The value of this insight may be potentially massive, but we need to be aware that much of generated IoT data is stil raw and unprocessed. Such "asset" is not ready to generate revenues in a short time and the fastest way to get to that point is SHARING. Why is that? As the famous quote states "Great minds think alike" - working with others is one of the fastest way to learn, because we share so needed lessons. Also, if your company doesn't have data analytics, intelligent algorithms, let alone machine learning and AI, the collaboration with others like you is a way to go. In short, data exchanges help companies discover, sort and take advantage from the growing wealth of data.

Going beyond the merely data 

Just two years ago, we entered into the "zettabyte era" for global IP traffic (1 ZB = 1 trillion GB), but currently, Cisco projects that IP traffic will go up to 3.3 ZB by 2021. Withing the IoT market, one of the fastest-growing data generators machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Cisco informs that this sector will grow at a 49 % CAGR between 2016-2021, as IoT grows to connect tens of billions “things”. 

For example [2], a person ordering a gift via a smartphone isn’t just providing information about their buying preferences. Data points like the time of day or location of the purchase might be of interest to companies besides the retailer, including ad servers or market analysis firms. We can already see many companies generating new business models (cross-sell) that helps them to continue being recognised on the market. Sharing (exchange) of data is THE driver that we have to bear in mind. Furthermore, companies that are involved in data exchanges enables themselves to buy, share and subscribe to wide extent of data stored in silos. They get the opportunity to analyse, extract, form and monetise data. 

Future of IoT Data

We are sharing the DeLoach's insights herein [3]: In the “Future of IoT” book, which DeLoach coauthored with Gartner analyst Emil Berthelsen and Wael Elrifai, an executive at Pentaho, he illustrates how the most advanced IoT implementations will not be single optimized products but systems of systems. In the first IoT phase, connected sensors help monitor how a product operates. It then can use that data to boost efficiency and productivity. 

But, the insightful information comes from contextual form of the whole picture, i.e. the broader image of the situation. For example, you can monitor humidity and temperature as much as you want, but unless you are a weather specialist or collaborating with meteorological office, you won't have much of valuable data, let alone to monetise that! The broader picture of what is contextually happening is of key value. In this example, if you monitor those two parameters, you'd need to add some weather APIs to support your use-cases, analyse them with professionals and see which environmental data you can store on your (or cloud) servers that will become useful enough. Then, someone may have profit from your data, right? 

“While it’s true that making sense of massive troves of IoT data can be a sizable challenge, the most successful organisations will be those that capture as much data as possible, letting utility dictate what to do with it, DeLoach explains. Edge computing can improve the signal-to-noise ratio while an event-driven, publish and subscribe data architecture can help ensure that the right data gets to the right place at the right time. “You start with capturing and securing it in a master repository,” DeLoach says. “But then you think about the data’s context in the larger environment, and how you can enrich and propagate it.”

So, sharing it is?

Having read above explanations of sharing IoT data can be really useful, but what all of this means, in its very core? Let's assume that a fresh start-up wants to take some share within the vastness of IoT market possibilities. If they don't have sufficient amount of money for the personnel, or equipment, which is often the case, how would they succeed in their business, then? The answer is: collaborate with others that are interested in this start-up's plans and grow step-by-step. There is probably no other way, unless some investor is willing to help with financials or they are lucky enough to get some form of a grant. Therefore, collaboration with similar start-ups or companies interested in their doing is a healthy way, slow, but a promising one. 

To conclude, sharing data can help with:

  • Analysing the vastness of IoT data in lack of specialists,

  • Promoting the company's portfolio (financial capital deficiency),

  • Building the network of alike companies throughout the world,

  • Getting the support of interested companies after product/service developed, etc.

As I like to inform: Sharing is caring, it really is, in its form. You may have an idea that you'd like to show to others, or even globally! What would you do first? Share the data! And for that, we have the Platform, devices and knowledge to provide you with.

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