The Internet of Things & Big Data

We are seeing increasing interest from a number of clients in IoT. While it’s still more of a hype phrase than reality there are a number of Organizations that can point to real success with IoT and Big Data. One of them is Transport for London who use heir thousands of sensors in their transport network to build actionable insights. Lauren Sager Weinstein of TfL explains more here https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/big-data-customer-experience.pdf

To me it seems that Public sector and particularly State and Local Government are the leading adopters of IoT and Big Data – interesting idea – local government as technology leaders. In particular we see this trend in Europe rather than the USA. In multiple regional and EU projects where government is trying to leverage their massive array of sensors to improve delivery of services to citizens.

The area where there is a lot of discussion but not a lot of real use cases is in the Enterprise. This week I was at a very large retailer who is a client of ours. Clearly Retailing is the next obvious sector for IoT. Lots of locations, lots of customers, lots of channels, lots of assets producing data. David Dorf at Oracle put out a good list of possible use cases in January – you can read it here  http://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2015/01/09/how-the-internet-of-things-will-shake-up-retail-in-2015/

So – what next? It’s clear IoT is going to change Big Data Architectures again, just as we get used to Spark possibly replacing MapReduce, the massive increase in data volumes and types from IoT, is, for sure, going to lead to another architecture pivot.

What are your thoughts? Do you see IoT use cases in the Enterprise happening to-day or is it just talk. What about Public sector – are they the leaders in IoT?