From Internet-of-Things to Internet-of-Everything
Computing technology is leading the convergence of technologies to change daily life as it is.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on Forbes China, and has been translated into English.
For modern technologies, convergence is the name of the game. We have reached the point wherein even common household implements or city infrastructures have some form of embedded computing and internet in them — including refrigerators, thermostats, household locks, cars, vacuum cleaners, traffic lights, and more.
Statista has predicted that by 2020, we will have 30 billion connected things online, growing to at least 74 billion by 2025.
“Our IoT data usage grows by almost 30 percent every year, and by 2025, we will be generating around 80 zettabytes of data from sources like video surveillance, computer vision, audio, video, data from sensors, and more,” says Kenny Au, Founder at Elevate Ventures and Advisory. “For machine learning and artificial intelligence to effectively use this metadata, sufficient processing power is required at a cost effective rate.”
“The future of the IoT industry will be supported by three key concepts: hybrid, convergence and machine-to-machine economy,” says Jean-Charles Cabelguen, PhD, Chief of Innovation and Adoption at iExec.
He stresses on how cloud computing would need to evolve in order to support all this innovation: “The cloud computing industry has reached a good level of maturity on the technical side as well on the acceptance side. Today companies have tested the benefit and flexibility offered by the cloud.”
Internet-of-everything is about convergence and resource sharing
On the need to overcome technical challenges, Dr. Cabelguen says: “Indeed to address issues like low latency or preprocessing, IT infrastructures will need to mix solutions. Computing technology based solutions might be an efficient answer to combine edge computing and cloud computing. And when we think about resource sharing, we will need layers of technologies recording how the providers behave and how the resources are used.”
Thus, computing technology can add a layer of trust into converged clouds, including tracking who provides, what is provided, how it is used and how valuable the results are. This can leverage technologies like Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and the Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), which provide a secure and exclusive environment for executing code within a device.
“Decentralized technologies allow computing resources deployed by different entities to be composed into a single logical cloud,” says Michael Reed, Computing Technology Program Director at Intel.
Smart cities will highlight the sharing economy
The most obvious benefit of computing technology is that it provides a convergence layer across different clouds and cloud computing platforms. However, on a deeper level, it also enables cost and benefit sharing across these users and infrastructures.
“Computing technology can help make a sharing economy of computing resources. Computing technology can be used to create a marketplace of available resources, and digital assets can be used to compensate compute resources upon use,” adds Reed.
This will be particularly effective when businesses and IoT data providers do not necessarily have a well-defined relationship. For instance, a city’s traffic management system might learn from transportation data derived from a logistics provider — the data might be shared and monetized even without the two ever directly dealing with each other.
Dr. Cabelguen cites the smart city, for example: “In smart cities of the future, we will have millions of connected devices, built and owned by thousands of different companies. But, for both hardware and software, there will not exist just one single standard. So we will need solutions to allow those fragmented infrastructures to work together. And here again computing technology based cloud platforms might be the ideal bridge to allow IoT systems deployed by different companies to collaborate.”
Computing technology will be the glue that holds it all together
Intel’s Reed provides a parallel comparison, which is in how businesses have learned to outsource their infrastructure to the cloud — something that was unthinkable in the decades past. In future, even these converged clouds will no longer be something businesses need to directly engage. “IoT use cases often involve multiple entities without established business relationships. In such an environment, the edge-IoT solution can be thought of as a multiparty shared cloud that can benefit from computing technology in much the same way as traditional cloud computing environments.”
He adds that computing technology essentially empowers participants to derive value from data without the complexities of formal relationships. “Cloud computing technology will help democratize the IoT industry by enabling participants to deliver services without requiring a formal agreement with an established edge infrastructure provider.”
The future of connected things is all about value
There is still much work to be done, however. Dr. Cabelguen concludes that the key here is to establish value, so that people and companies will be incentivized to participate in the data-sharing economy. “We will need interoperability layers to coordinate edge to cloud processing and also to rank the connected devices in the chain of value. As for people and companies today, the idea is to incentivize connected devices to behave well and to provide valuable services. This is the first step into the machine to machine economy.”
Image Credit: Pixabay
Featured in the story
Dr. Jean-Charles Cabelguen (iExec)
Jean-Charles Cabelguen is Chief of Innovation & Marketing at iExec and Chair at the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Dr. Cabelguen has a PhD in Science from ENSAM ParisTech and 12 years of experience working on international business development interacting with big players like EDF, Areva, and Cegelec. As a digital entrepreneur, he also worked on go-to-market strategies and marketing campaigns with more than 80 companies.
Michael Reed (Intel Corporation)
Michael Reed is Blockchain Program Director at Intel Corporation. He is a corporate intrapreneur/incubation executive with experience funding and driving technology ventures related to blockchain, cryptocurrency, online payments, RFID, Internet of Things, cloud computing and consumer electronics. With 20+ years of success creating new technology businesses that command market-segment leadership and $100M+ revenue, Reed is an agile leader, proven successful in venture-funded startups and Fortune 100 divisions. He is an outstanding people manager recognized for assembling talented teams and leading them to unprecedented results.
Kenny Au (Elevate Ventures)
Kenny Au is the founder of Elevate Ventures. Elevate Ventures is a Technology Ventures and Advisory firm.. The team at Elevate Ventures has extensive experience in fintech and blockchain sectors focused in South East Asia and China.
