Background
The
'Internet of Things' refers to the equipping of all physical objects
in the world with some form of minuscule identifying devices or
computer sensors that can be inter-connected or networked
together.
However,
as the sensors embedded in these 'things' are enhanced and add new
capabilities like context awareness, increased data processing
power, and more sophisticated communications features, what we
currently refer to as the Internet
of Things (IoT)
is morphing into something called the Internet
of Everything (IoE).
The definition of these terms continue to evolve as development and
implementation of the concepts and technologies move forward.
The
Internet currently connects anywhere from 10 to 15 billion devices.
That equates to less than 1 percent of 'things'. According to ABI
Research, by 2020 more than 30 billion devices will be
wirelessly connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), or the
Internet of Everything (IoE). By 2050, there will be trillions of
inter-connected 'things' not only all around us, but also 'inside'
us.
According
to McKinsey
& Company, "the widespread adoption of the Internet of
Things (IoT) will take time, but the time line is advancing thanks
to improvements in underlying technologies. Advances in wireless
networking technology and the greater standardization of
communications protocols make it possible to collect data from these
sensors almost anywhere at any time." They peg the potential
economic impact of IoT at $2.7 trillion to $6.2 trillion by
2025.
Gartner
predicts that the Internet of Everything (IoE) will add $1.9
trillion to the global economy by 2020. It is expected that the
numbers related to IoE will continue to climb over the next several
decades given falling costs, adoption of open standards, emergence
of innovative open hardware solutions, and the growth of cloud
computing.
IDC
put the Internet of things technology and services spending at $4.8
trillion in 2012 and expects the market to be $8.9 trillion in 2020.
IDC said the installed base of things connected will be 212 billion
by the end of 2020, including 30.1 billion connected autonomous
things. Intelligent systems will be installed and collecting data by
this point.
Key
Observations
& Conclusions
The
Internet of Things (IoT), or the Internet of Everything (IoE), is going to create new markets and a
new economy for the 21st century. Estimates of the dollar value
associated with IoE are all over the place – but all the figures
mentioned are staggering. They run from $1.9 trillion to more then
$14 trillion over the next decade.
According
to a white
paper by Gartner, the verticals that are leading its adoption
are manufacturing (15%), healthcare
(15%),
and insurance (11%).
Even
as industries continue to move rapidly forward with plans to build
the Internet of Everything (IoE), arguments are being made that not
enough thought is being given to privacy, security, ethics, and the
potential for a great number of unintended negative consequences.
The need for more public debate about issues like this seems
obvious, given the many recent revelations about NSA's unauthorized
spying on American citizens. The potential for abuse of the
technology by governments and private companies is very
real.
Finally,
it appears that for the Internet of Everything (IoE) to bring real
value, industry should continue to adopt and build on open
standards. To move things along and keep costs down, the industry
should also continue to use 'open source' software such as -
embedded operating systems software (Linux, Android); network
infrastructure (IPv6); web software (Java, LAMP stack); cloud
infrastructure (OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus); M2M software
stacks (Mango, DeviceHive, Mihini); RFID software (OpenBeacon,
Fostrak); database systems (Hadoop, HBase, Mongo, NoSQL).
With
the Internet of Everything (IoE), we are now diving headlong into
the 21st century and the 'Information Age'. We need to be training and equipping our students to work in this new world. P.S. - If you thought
things have been changing rapidly, think again. It's about to get
real wild.
Other
Selected IoT / IoE Links
