If 2015 was the year when the hype cycle around the Internet of Things came to a crescendo, signs point to 2016 being a time when more businesses gain a better understanding of its facets and how IoT can transform business models.
"I suspect that we are through the piloting stage in a wide enough number of major companies to have some basic conclusions on how to make IoT work for you," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mullholland.
There are dozens of IoT-dedicated industry events slated for this year. Certainly, some are longer-standing M2M conferences with a bit of IoT rebranding, but the uptick is nonetheless significant. These don't even account for the growing amount of IoT content being scheduled for single-vendor conferences as industry players continue putting together their IoT strategies.
Perhaps even more significant—and telling—are the IoT educational opportunities being rolled out not for IT professionals, but workers on the business side. A key case in point: MIT's upcoming online course, which will feature appearances by instructors as prominent as Tim Berners-Lee. As Computerworld reports:
The courses "are targeted at professionals who are trying to think about the future of their companies," said Sanjay Sarma, dean of digital learning at MIT and a professor of mechanical engineering.
Students do not need a technical background to complete the IoT course. That's in contrast to a master's program, which will look at the issues in a more fundamental way and consider the engineering, physics or chemistry of a given topic, said Sarma.
The expectation is that students will leave the course with an understanding of the foundational principles, architectures, applications, security and protocols that underpin the IoT, said Sarma.
Analysis: Education Is Crucial to Realizing IoT's Potential
"Too much about IoT has been either been overblown statistics or technology-driven, much as the Web was presented in the year 2000," Mullholland says. "However again, just as the Web there is a strong foundational capability in IoT to answer real business problems and create just as big an impact."
However, "then as now, the answer lay in getting a broad education in the core technology and its capabilities, rather than accepting a narrow and possibly introverted view from individual products. That's where this new and growing focus on education comes into play as more and more good examples are becoming available to study and learn how the business value is created."
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