The real future of IoT is in the industry: Advantech

When the Internet of Things (IoT) applications mature, a majority of them will be used in the industrial sector and not consumer sector, according to Advantech, a company that provides embedded and automation products and solutions.
 
Speaking at a recent seminar, Allan Yang, CTO of Advantech, cited research findings from McKinsey as he said ten years from now, when the IoT applications mature, 70 percent of their applications will be in industrial scenarios.
 
“The biggest one is the smart factory, popularly called industry 4.0,” he said. “The second one is smart city, health care and the third is personal smart devices.”
 
In other words, a significant portion of IoT applications in the future is going to be about business operators throwing technology to improve their own business operations. This is where Advantech capitalizes its strength on as it offers solutions to businesses alone, not consumers.
 
“We look at the IoT value chain, starting from the silicon to the module and then to the cloud,” Yang said. Industry research indicates that 80 percent of the value will be on the cloud, in services.
 
When the IoT applications are put together and it is integrated into the day-to-day operations, there is a recurring value that the service provider can collect every month. This is unlike conventional vendors who are able to get value out of their products only once.
 
Advantech looks at Industrial IoT is by layering the whole architecture into what is on the ground and what is on the cloud. On the ground, you are going to have a lot of sensors responsible for sensing the data and collecting them into the gateway. Most of the applications are going to implement some sort of intelligence at the edge to do what can be processed locally before sending them to the cloud.  
 
“Up in the cloud, the end result is something called the SaaS (Software as a Service) layer of vertical applications, which many of us prefer to call solutions,” Yang said. These include solutions for factories, solutions for retail stores, solutions for energy and power, etc. The number of industries that are looking to bring in the new technology to improve their own business is quite significant.