The Internet of the Machine

Tomorrow, The Internet of the Machine Will Drive Your Business…

 Software as a Service (SaaS) has become one of the key driver behind technology in the last few years. In today’s world companies of all size use SaaS to support their business objectives. The primacy of such objectives rest on the ability for companies to monitor, acquire, correlate, aggregate and analyze data from which companies derive the strategy necessary to support and meet revenue goals.

Subsequently data gathering and processing is either performed thru a network of systems or humans. In many case humans create workflows that performs tasks and actions to deliver a business benefit. As an example, your bank may have setup overdraft protection for which when your account goes below a specific cash level it automatically receives additional funds. Unbeknown to most, the overdraft workflow may create additional activities from which would send an email acknowledging the action taken in addition correlated workflow(s) may also notify a bank employee to check back with you on your account status.

As the aforesaid example shows, most workflows are created by humans; inherently progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine-To-Machine (m2m) connectivity  - AT&T/Verizon view cellular Machine connectivity has a boom for their business - has setup the stage for machine to learn, decipher and derive actions or tasks thru Data Collaboration Workflow that are current reserved for human. 

The Internet of Everything (IoE – people, process, data, and things) has accelerated a trend for which other “Entities” must now process and analyze the data to drive tasks or actions as human are faced with a daunting task of digesting and keeping up with the size and speed of data. I’m sure you read every day about Big Data and its effect on business.

Internet of the Machine

I foresee that within 5 years, the Internet of the Machine (IoM) will collaborate on managing retail truck delivery for which the Machine will receive weather forecast data indicating “Heavy Snow Storm”, consequently the machine will check road traffic conditions and reroute products from Colorado to Nevada to a store who has low inventory after having checked online and discovered a high customer demand for those products. Such m2m Data Collaboration Workflow will become common practice and will help increase revenue while providing better cost management.

A new breed of scientists, technicians and engineers are already hard at work fulfilling such foresight but companies must also invest in defining new strategies to support the paradigm of the IoM, this would also include connectivity, architecture, infrastructure and Cloud services. As for the later I would recommend taking a look at one of my favorite Cloud provider, in this case SoftLayer.

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