The IoT (Internet of Things) is all about creating new business models. IBM sees potential in pairing its Watson IoT platform with aerial drones, as IDG News Service reports:
AI-powered drones soon will be everywhere, monitoring crowds at major events, checking out traffic patterns on busy roads, surveying disaster sites, and inspecting airplanes.
IBM is edging into this airborne safety and maintenance market early, with a deal to bring its Watson internet of things technology to unmanned aircraft systems built by Netherlands-based Aerialtronics.
Data captured by high-resolution drone camera lenses will be fed into IBM's visual recognition application programming interfaces (APIs) and services on its Watson cognitive computing and Bluemix cloud-based analytics platforms.
The first market for the Aerialtronics drones is expected to be for cell tower maintenance. Instead of sending humans to laboriously climb towers and report back, inspection teams can deploy drones, which quickly gain a 360-degree overview, according to IBM. The visual recognition APIs can then analyze the images captured by the drone to detect problems like damaged cabling or equipment defects.
IBM will bill Aerialtronics based on the volume of data fed into Watson.
Analysis: With IoT, Everything Changes
The deal provides a great example of how IoT business models work and differ from traditional IT, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland, who leads Constellation's IoT research.
"There is a tendency for those from IT to relate IoT to being a superset of connections to what they know already, and therefore see it as computational, with transactions," Mulholland says. "In fact IoT might be better thought of as activity or event-based reactions with little resemblance to IT and its very fixed processes."
"IBM, together with others, is innovating with different ideas for smart services," Mulholland adds. "There is no computing program with a process towards an fixed transactional outcome. Instead there is an interpretation of whatever kind of data is provided as an input. As the exact findings of the inputs are unknown, the role of Watson is to draw together the various inputs and make a sensible deduction as to what the data means. The pricing for this is based on the activity and the business value rather than on traditional IT computational or cloud models that rely on constants such as the number of seats."
"Very few people, particularly those most familiar with IT and its traditional role in back office operational transactions, understand just how much of a change IoT is bringing to how an organization connects and interacts to operate more intelligently and in an optimized manner," Mulholland says. "Employees with really basic requirements such as service management are much quicker at spotting how IoT is not about IT, but about solving a wide variety of business problems."
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