Starting an IoT Consulting practice at your organization?
We are in an era of transformation to a completely connected world through Internet of Things. It is not just about consumer electronic device which you can control through your cell phone. The bigger beneficiaries are Enterprise businesses who now understand their product’s use case just in time. Through the information collected in real-time, they can design, engineer, market and sell in a more customer-centric way.
The whole of consulting biggies like Accenture, Deloitte etc. have started their IoT practices.However, many Data Analytics and BI leaders are facing challenges to start their IoT practices even today. My recent conversation with an evangelist of Intel Edison ended interestingly with his statement “Everyone in the consulting industry today talks about IoT, but only a handful dare to dive and give a try !. ” Yes, I would like to emphasize his statement which seemed realistic to me and have suggestions.
BI leaders are struggling with where to start, what are the technologies they need to concentrate and what makes the analytics with IoT and the traditional analytics different?
The reason which makes them difficult to start is the way they think about ‘Data’. Traditional Data Analytics and BI lack the idea of Streaming Data. There is always an ETL/ELT process involved with a traditional data warehouse technique. While I was working with a consulting firm, one of my customers used to see their daily sales report the very next day in their BI dashboard. It would seem like a good implementation for a traditional BI practitioner. But in 2017, it is not!
Imagine the excitement you have while you watch a Facebook/Instagram live video and the joy of seeing the presenter in the video responding to viewers reaction in real time. Yes, this is the joy of streaming live data.
The way you think with the devices connected to the internet is not much different, data will be flooding every single second and your analytics will be on top of it. This is Real-Time analytics.
What could be your IoT offering?
- BI and Analytics on real-time data collected through various devices and sensors.
- IoT device development and implementation practice where you tailor the device to your customer needs and manage.
- Data collection and connectivity to Data Stream Networks. ( I will focus on Data Stream Networks in my next post).
- Connect to third-party services and APIs while the data is in motion and process in real-time.
These practices require knowledge of cutting edge technologies which keep evolving all the time. There are very few vendors who take care of the complete infrastructure plumbing required for a business of enterprise scale and offer communication channels as a service. World’s first data stream network PubNub has many documentations and uses cases which you need to have a look.
To summarize, Change the way you think of Data. Think of scalability before it is too late. The way you manage this huge data in motion is very important. You need to have servers for communication between devices and your analytics engine which should scale up when the usage peaks. Think of cutting edge technologies like PubNub and train your staff with such cloud offerings. Think Real- Time before it is too late. Offer IoT!
