Robots will be a prominent element of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics according to organisers. Robots welcome spectators and athletes at competition venues and relay the events to those watching remotely. While the robotic experience starts at the airport, Toyota is said to deploy e-Palette, autonomous driving vehicles that will loop around the Olympic and Paralympic villages to shuttle athletes and staff.
Are the technologies to be used at the Olympics a taste of things to come? Probably! Does this mean that the technology, including IoT, are mature and ready for commercial deployment? Maybe.
The Future of IoT paper by EY lists industries including manufacturing, utilities, transportation and logistics, agriculture, oil and gas, and smart cities, as being at the forefront of IoT experimentation and pilots. The issue is how far along are these proof of concepts from becoming reality.
FutureIoT spoke to Jitender Khurana, general manager, Signify at Singapore and emerging SE Asia markets, on the evolution of smart cities and the role IoT plays towards achieving the aspirations of governments and industries, particularly in the areas of smart cities, smart industries and smart homes.
While acknowledging that IoT has been around for many years, Khurana also affirmed that adoption is accelerating in part due to smart city initiatives and industry-specific projects and developments around the world.
Why new IoT is good
Khurana said setting aside the advances that have come as technology matures, one of the biggest changes of the industry’s use of IoT is the recognition that IoT is an industry play and as such it is about various players talking, cooperating and engaging for the wider good.
“IoT solution providers have started to bring a lot of integrated solutions. They have started to talk about use cases which help the owner solve the problems of today. This has resulted in end users seeing far more benefits from the IoT solutions of today from what they have seen three to five years back,” observed Khurana.
The effect has been that growing number of commercially viable offerings. Also, there is an improved ROI situation, as well as prospects for true scalability.
“So, all those elements, which typically in some sense were a limiting factor for an end user to choose for an IoT solution, have started to play out in a much more favourable way in today’s world versus a few years back. Hence, we see that is far more appetite and far more potential for IoT going forward,” he continued.
IoT precautions and future-proofing
The IoT value chain is a myriad of participants many of whom approach the IoT customer problem from their vantage point.
The “integrated approach” as well as evolving regulation are still fairly recent and will see some time before commercial maturation. Khurana cautioned that IoT will continue to evolved in the next few years.
He suggests end users to define their problem, look for an ecosystem rather than a solution provider “because seldom you would have one provider who can solve it all.”
“You need to look at an option of working with different players. But very important is that all these players are open and are willing to integrate and connect to different players, in order to give the most leverage of a system, towards an end user’s needs. It’s very important that all the systems and all the IoT solutions offered use open APIs, where one system can talk to the other system and making sure it starts give a real compelling use case,” he advised.
He warned that systems that work in siloes will not allow end users to leverage the true benefits of IoT.
He believed that as long as end users demand open solutions [interoperability and integration], they are futureproofing their IoT investments.
IoT in 2020
He remains positive on the future prospects of IoT, and not because analysts and industry players are quoting very large numbers.
“As an industry practitioner, I would say there is a strong appetite at this moment among different stakeholders – be it private or public – which suggests a strong growth in the IoT sector,” he opined. He noted continued interest in utilities, governments, building usage and management.
“There is a strong push to get various stakeholders to deliver compelling IoT solutions in terms of driving efficiency improvements, sustainability, and of course ensuring the productivity and well-being of the people who work in the buildings,” he commented.
Show me the money
Asked whether the use of return on investment (ROI) to justify investments remains a valid approach to pursue the technology, Khurana was adamant that ROI is the final metric that determines whether a solution gets pass the proof of concept stage.
“Where the application doesn’t have an ROI story, as compelling as the innovation is, we don’t see things taking off. I have seen a lot of deployments in Singapore where we have managed to do POCs, but only few have the ROI for scaling up,” he concluded.
