While new sensor, mobile and wireless technologies are driving the evolution of the internet of things (IoT), the true business value of the IoT lies in big data analytics rather than hardware novelties.
After all, why transmit information from IoT devices to the end user if you don’t have an analytics platform rich enough to extract insights from it or transform it into meaningful consumer experiences?
We’ve spoken with some leading software developers who are pioneering the bleeding edge of IoT analytics to help you understand how it’s enabling transformative business opportunities.
What’s Special About IoT Analytics?
The first thing to understand about analytics on IoT data is that it involves datasets generated by sensors, which are now both cheap and sophisticated enough to support a seemingly endless variety of use cases.
The potential of sensors lies in their ability to gather data about the physical environment, which can then be analyzed or combined with other forms of data to detect patterns.
The ability of sensors to understand physics reveals some of the real-time context around a given person, which can then be combined with the expressiveness of social media data to yield a strong understanding of an individual person or a group of people. If this is done right, it can enable a huge set of new services for the consumer.
Other kinds of data than sensor data that are involved in IoT projects include:
- Video feeds
- Mobile geolocation data
- Product usage data, which isn’t necessarily sensor data
- Social media data, which can be collated with IoT data
- Log files (computer-generated records of operations and events in software applications, networks etc.)
To say that these types of data aren’t specific to the IoT is to miss the point. In many cases, the value of sensor data only becomes clear when it’s integrated and correlated with other data sources.
Let’s take a look now at some use cases for IoT analytics and business intelligence that can drive transformative business impacts across a number of verticals.
Emerging Use Cases for IoT Data Analytics,
- Use Case #1: Consumer Product Usage Analysis for Marketing
- Use Case #2: Serving Consumers and Business Users With the Same Analytics
- Use Case #3: Sensors and Cameras Enable Connected Events
- Use Case #4: Video Analytics for Surveillance and Safety
Steps Toward Implementation
The use cases we’ve examined should give you some idea of the breadth of what you can achieve with IoT analytics.
We haven’t covered the details of the enabling technologies behind IoT platforms, which use specialized types of data science to deal with vast, real-time datasets generated by sensors. Research firm Gartner covers these technologies, along with artificial intelligence and industrial IoT tools, and the analytical methods used with them in a report on best practices for IoT analytics (this content is available to Gartner clients).