As IT departments start to consider how to provide suitable quality support for their enterprises' IOT initiatives the adoption of a ‘Platform’ to reduce deployment times and costs is a logical move, but what exactly is an IoT Platform? Even more important than the technology definition is capabilities that a new generation of IoT business requirements will demand.
IT practitioners have had much of their thinking and understanding of 'Platforms' shaped over the last few years by their experiences with provisioning Applications, Apps, and some Services onto Clouds Platforms. It has taken more than five years for clarity to emerge on Cloud Platforms, partly due to technology maturing, but largely due to the new, and largely unforeseen in the early days, Business capabilities that became possible by using Cloud technology capabilities.
The shift from IT department initiatives to lower operational costs of traditional IT Enterprise Applications to creating business competitive value by Apps and Services caused many Enterprise investments in ‘Cloud Platforms’ to become ‘troublesome’. Planned moves for simplification with flexibility in provisioning delivery around Platform as a Service, PaaS, started to have to integrate with ‘Everything as a Service’, or XaaS at which point both Vendor and Architecture lock-in became issues.
Unfortunately deploying an IoT Platform looks likely to run through the same pattern as initial views on the use of IoT are most likely to be internally dominated around straight forward use of sensors for monitoring buildings, machines or expense assets. The longer term will see IoT as ‘anything and everything’ connected and interactively responsive in near ‘Real-Time’ heralding the new competitive Digital Business era.
The danger therefore is to take initial technology, (and first generation business), requirements to define an IoT Platform requirement. The IT department needs to some through research to understand IoT, (Internet of Things), and AoT, (Analytics of Things), in order to see beyond these initial requirements. Thankfully there are now enough early adopter excellent business case studies published to be able to get a relatively clear picture.
Business Management sites are usually the prime source for case studies on how IoT and AoT are transforming Business, rather than Technology sites that by their very purpose are there to provide technical descriptions of the functionality of the current products.
In a way the very term IoT focuses the Platform requirement at the wrong end of the Business value chain. Yes, its true that without the ubiquitous connectivity of IoT devices of all types there would be no new capabilities. As ever the business value comes from the data flows from the IoT Devices, hence the increasing use of the term AoT, Analysis of Things. But its not more ‘Big Data’ to be analyzed in batches, instead the Business value is in as near to ‘Real-Time’ as possible ‘Reading’ of the Data Flows in order to create optimal individually ‘reactions’.
The ‘Digital Economy’, ‘Internet Economy’, or Services Economy’ are all terms for the same transformation; Changing the basis of market competition by using ‘real-time’ intelligence allied to a new generation of ‘Smart’ Services. Think of the impact of Social CRM around interacting and reacting with People, and then add the reaction to events fed by machines, events, and locations to understand how IoT/AoT will shape the future.
Those initial starting internally oriented requirements around connecting a finite number of defined sensors to on screen displays will soon be replaced by demands to deploy sophisticated externally oriented competitive Smart Services to compete in the market places.
This should read as a familiar pattern to those who have worked through the various stages of the adoption of Cloud technology, and the refocus of its capabilities into new Business value creating Enterprise advantage. The simple tool for internal cost reduction moved to becoming a key element in competitive business survival.
There are many pages of independent advice on choosing, operating, even contracting, for Cloud Platforms, but there is very little independent advice to be found on the topic of IoT Platforms. So what are the general characteristics that make an IoT/AoT Platform, or deployment environment, different?
Is there an equivalent to a Cloud Platform? A definition of a Platform as being able to facilitate the deployment of business software by hiding the complexity of the common underlying hardware and software layers. Key to this definition is that a Platform is generally ‘infrastructural’ by nature, provides constant connectivity between various elements, and has a stable set of common core functions. Indeed the whole concept of a Platform is tied to the stability, even predictability, of the environment.
In direct contrast with the stability of Cloud Platforms, and their environment, IoT creates its new business values from the ability to optimizing individual responses from dynamic, unpredictable, events. The often quoted ‘IoT/AoT Insightful Outcomes’ provides value simply because there is no previous foreseeable, or planned, relationships.
An IoT Platform has to simultaneously provide the simple, abstraction, of core technology elements for Developers of Smart Services; and the operational management of Data Flows occurring from unique dynamic event based activities.
An example may help to illustrate the point; Based on a group of IoT sensors triggering to report various event conditions from an Air Conditioner installed in an Office Building. The sensors are connected to an IoT Platform that collates the individual sensor event Data Flows into the recognition that the Air Conditioner has failed. The IoT Platform is supporting multiple IoT/AoT Smart Services, each providing a different and individual set of ‘Read and Response’ functions for some operational aspect of the Office Building.
Only one of those Services activates and manages the activities of an Air Conditioning Engineer and needs to recieve this particular Data Flow, with continuous ‘real time’ analysis optimizing the ‘smart’ operational reactions. However, in parallel there may well be several such event triggers and Data Flows invoking different Smart Services taking place at the same time.
An IoT ‘Platform’ has to support a complex, dynamic, multi functional capability covering both conventional Platform connectivity and common abstracted functions, AND, in addition to provide AoT ‘read and react’ with intelligent switching of Data Flows to individual Services as well.
This is most definitely not a description of the capabilities normally associated with a Platform, in fact the critical dynamic functionality closely resembles the definition normally applied to an ‘Engine’. In traditional computer programming the term Engine refers to a program that performs a core, or essential function for other program stating an ‘Engine’ to be an application program that coordinates the overall operation of other programs.
Architecturally an Engine is the central, or focal, program in an operating system, or subsystem. Once again the definition suits the role of an IoT/AoT Platform that in the decentralized ecosystem of IoT is performing the role of coordinating disparate activities into recognizable functional outcomes.
The simple Platform model derived from Clouds with their structured predictable use simply doesn’t fit with the requirements for the dynamic real time ‘Platform’ role needed to support Business valuable Smart Services driven by IoT/AoT ‘read and react’ optimizations.
The requirement IoT Platform definition comprises of three elements combining Platform, and Engine, into a sophisticated Enterprise and Business operational environment;
- Common IoT connectivity with associated levels of device management
- Abstraction of common functions to simplify delivery of Smart Services
- AoT Data Flow real time analysis with intelligent switching Smart Services
Additionally, IoT is, by definition, based on ever growing massive numbers of a huge variety of devices coming into use. An increasing majority of which will not be chosen, defined, or controlled, by the Enterprise that wants to make use of their data. Vendor lock in element of IoT/AoT architecture is a further risk to be considered.
Initial specifications for an IoT Platform will be to support initial IoT deployments and will often favor a particular vendor product that has been optimized for the installed IoT sensors, and data analytics. As Vendor lock has usually proved to be a major issue in successful long-term investment, and, with the recent experience of Cloud Platforms to offer further guidance, appreciation of the real functionality of this important Enterprise Business investment is essential.
The danger of early IoT requirements with direct-coupled simple Services masking the reality of the fast developing Business use of IoT/AoT with real-time Smart Services is all too obvious. The wise IT department will remember the opening part of this blog around how the role of Clouds changed and expanded redefining the requirements and uses of ‘Cloud Platform’.
As the era of IoT mass connectivity and real time AoT data drives market competitiveness based on Smart Services it will become imperative for an Enterprise to be able to have an IoT Platform, but it has to be close coupled to an AoT Engine.
Footnotes;
1)This blog refers to a fully functional integration Enterprise Platform capable of supporting interactions between multiple Smart Services by connecting IoT Sensors with AoT Dataflow analysis in an intelligent manner. This is NOT the same as an App Shop style Platforms currently in use and featured in the blog; Introducing market disruption strategies for market leaders based IoT platform collaboration
2) This blog is intended primarily to be read as part of the ongoing series of Blogs on the development of IoT, and now AoT, as Business Solutions supported by Technology integration and deployments. As such it uses terms and concepts explored in previous blogs; See for the full Blog series https://www.constellationr.com/users/andy-mulholland - profile2_main_account_group_research_agenda
