Software, Not Hardware, Will Power the Internet of Things

Today’s connected world is moving from devices towards things, what this means is that by using increasingly low cost sensors embedded in devices we can create many new use cases. These span across use cases in cities, vehicles, home, offices, factories, retail environments, worksites, health, logistics, and health. These use cases rely on ubiquitous connectivity and generate massive amounts of data at scale. These technologies enable new business opportunities, ways to optimize and automate, along with new ways to engage with users.

These technologies have been enabled by a perfect storm of technologies converging. They include both hardware, transport, and analytics.

• Inexpensive sensors – As highlighted by this research by the ITAC http://itac.ca/uploads/events/execforum2010/rob_lineback_10-6-10-2.ppt sensor prices have been continually dropping.
• Ubiquitous internet access – Powered by the pervasive mobile technology devices and sensors can be connected to the internet. Less than a decade ago, the powerful computers in our pockets did not exist. Powered by standard connectivity and protocols such as Bluetooth, Wifi, and NFC driven by protocols such as Zigbee and ubiquitous APIs.
• Cloud technology – High speed on demand processing, storage and capabilities enabled by public cloud create the backbone for information collection and analysis on demand. These resources and platforms are easily accessible to all to collect data and provide insight into the usage of the thing.

What is the glue which makes all of this possible? Software is the key to IoT, this makes everything function together and creates these new capabilities and opportunities. This is why we believe seeing inside the software is key to visibility for purposes of troubleshooting and creating insight into the IoT. The complexity and scale issues presented by IoT on both the backend (in the cloud) and the frontend (things themselves) is a major challenge for not only the systems themselves, but for the management tooling of these interconnected and fluid systems.

Other key cautions for IoT include:

• Software is not being managed properly, both in terms of availability and performance.
• Data ownership of the data collected and mined.
• Data security of collected data which can be used for malicious purposes.
• Battery technology has largely not evolved for 15 years or more, this is a major limitation to today’s devices and connected things.

As a company AppDynamics believes that IoT will be a key part of computing and interconnected systems of the future, our customers are increasingly applying our technologies to these use cases, and we look forward to becoming an integral part of both collecting and analyzing data within these systems.