Software AG has released its latest predictions about the Internet of Things for 2019. Philip Hooker, Vice President for Online Business, IoT & Cloud at Software AG, said: “Smart homes, data democratization, design thinking, the edge and lightweight M2M – these are some of the lesser-mentioned predictions you will read about the IoT next year. They are the bedrock of innovative change.”
Here are the 2019 predictions:
1. It’s coming home! IoT’s Coming Home
It’s not just English football cups that can “come home” – IoT is doing it too. As smart home devices and services increase in 2019, we will start to see pressure building to break down the barriers between vertical ecosystems and the rapid growth of 3rd party solutions from non-smart-product manufacturers. The latter will fill a widening gap of compelling propositions that create valuable solutions for consumers which utilize a heterogeneous range of home devices.
2. I voted for the Other Guy
Open dialog and transparency are said to be the basic tenet of a healthy democracy, which is why we will see the democratization of IoT in 2019. Everyone is a developer these days and there has been a boom of innovation teams and intrapreneurs. Luckily, the evolution of IoT is creating frameworks, tools and part-baked solutions for all elements of the IoT ecosystem which allow the business user or “citizen developer” to quickly create IoT solutions for their own specific business problems in minutes. The introduction of self-service analytics will bring the power of sophisticated analytical processes including machine-learning to the masses. Very democratic!
3. The Tao of IoT
There will be a mental shift to a “new” path for IoT, which will think about the development and continuous improvement of solutions – rather than the “old” path where IoT is considered from merely a device perspective. Perhaps the most easily understandable concept is how devices are considered in the design process though. The designs closest to the essence of the Tao recognize that there must be both flexibility and robustness; that a design should be built from the inside out, not the outside in; that processes will always evolve; and that devices will always change through a solution’s lifetime.
4. Making Every Little Thing Think Thin
Every microprocessor based thing already thinks, but the level of thinking that is done is limited. Two key trends are changing the way that these devices can experience “life-long” learning. First, ubiquitous connectivity, cheap silicon and proven software stacks is creating a paradigm shift in device management, with in-life management and proactive security updates. Second, a “thin edge” approach will allow a virtual Einstein’s brain to be put into each and every Thing. This means organizations can focus on the hardware and software integration of IoT, allowing analytics experts to evolve the devices’ understanding of the world and value delivered to the end customers.
5. There is no place like 127.0.0.1.
And here is the soupcon of geek I mentioned. We will see many more measures seen in 2019 to make IoT developers’ jobs easier. First, is the increase in use of LWM2M, an early standard that is slowly growing in adoption and will likely foster the creation of the world’s largest technical catalogue of interoperable IoT devices. Second, is peer to peer (P2P) – these connections are starting to emerge through the increased adoption of edge technologies, and are likely to explode following the adoption of advanced federated identity management.
