EXPERT SPEAK
There are plenty of good ideas out
there for using the Internet of Things
but, without integration, many will fail.
Without integration, IoT can never reach
its full potential. According to Forrester,
almost half of companies (44%) say that
integrating enterprise and IoT data is one
of their biggest challenges. But, if you get it
right, your good ideas can take off, bringing
in both new business models and revenues.
A great example is one of our customers
who manufactures and sells blinds. Its
exterior Venetian blinds are used to naturally
control the heat and glare from sunlight in
many residential and business buildings.
But there was a problem: When hailstorms
hit, the blinds were extremely vulnerable to
damage, leading to costly, time-consuming
insurance claims.
Our customer wanted to solve this by
using IoT. The idea was to take real time
meteorological data from the country’s
leading weather service and use it to trigger
an IoT alert response in sensors built into
the blinds.
It works like this: A hailstorm is detected,
IoT data communicates with an edge device
installed in the hardware, the blinds go up
and damage is avoided. Happy customers.
Happy insurers.
This all happens through an IoT platform,
which enables the integration of sensors
and data to produce the alerts and actions. If
the weather data was not integrated, there
would be no alerts. If there are no alerts, the
hailstones would wreak their usual havoc!
Mirza Salihagic, Senior Manager, Product Marketing at Software AG
If you get it right,
your good ideas can
take off, bringing in
both new business
models and revenues.
Research, 70% of respondents struggle
to integrate IoT solutions into their
existing workflows.
And this is where integration come to
play. For improving operational efficiencies
and increasing production quality,
integrating the IoT data with enterprise
applications and processes is imperative.
Integration is also crucial to improving
customer experience and innovating new
products and services – hence creating new
revenue streams. Connecting IoT sensors in
your products with ERP and billing system
can enable you to sell these products via a
consumption-based model or provide new
services to your customers.
End-to-end IoT business solutions
are composed of different technologies
that need to be properly integrated to
work together. And that is challenging.
Variety of IoT devices, applications and
systems, heterogeneous data models and
communication protocols increase the
complexity and require more than just
basic built-in capabilities provided by most
of the IoT platforms. The increasing number
of IoT use cases increases the need for
advanced integration capabilities that can
tackle any integration challenge in an easy
and rapid fashion.
So, it’s all about the connection between
the physical and virtual worlds and it can
be challenging. To get maximum value from
your IoT projects, you should consider using
a platform that easily integrates IoT data
with the core systems and processes that
have run your business for years. Connect
with us to make IoT simple. •
Why is integration so important?
The IoT market is estimated to grow
substantially between now and 2025,
despite setbacks due to the COVID-19
pandemic. Companies have ‘got’ the
hardware bit of IoT – the ability to collect
a critical mass of IoT device data and
then transmit it to a local or cloud-based
processing hub. Where they begin to
struggle is putting that data to action.
According to a recent study by Beecham
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