“If enterprises are not looking at IoT today, they will lose in their industry,” recently said VMware IoT expert Mimi Spier.
Why do companies suddenly need an enterprise IoT strategy? Connect Atlanta keynote speaker David Pogue, founder of Yahoo Tech, asked Mimi everything enterprises need to know about the emerging technology. Watch the video and read the interview below.
Q: For the layperson, how do you describe IoT?
Mimi: IoT is the future of everything. It’s a combination of three technologies:
- The expectation we have with mobile—the immediacy of having information at our fingertips.
- The transformation of data. If you look at the history of data and how long it took to do analytics—getting data out of things and getting it into other things—it was very difficult. And now, it is pervasive in everything.
- And the network—it’s how easily we can access the network. The bandwidth has opened up (it’s not quite there). Latency is better.
The combination of those things is going to enable us to connect the world and create new business processes for the enterprise.
Q: Most people have not heard of the Internet of Things, and of the ones who have, those think, ‘Oh, that’s where I can turn on a light with an app.’ I take it they’re missing the bigger picture.
Mimi: They are, and my favorite example is my sprinkler system. My sprinkler system tells me when it’s going to rain, it skips watering when it says it’s going to rain and it adapts to different time periods of the year and how hot it is. It’s amazing, and it tells me my soil moisture!
That is a good example where consumers can relate, but I agree the enterprise has a completely new tidal wave of IoT coming at them.
Q: How is it useful for companies?
Mimi: There’s a couple different ways. The first is productivity. There’s an opportunity to be much more productive in factories, in oil rigs, in hospitals, etc.
It’s also about agility: Responding quicker to customer behavior, responding quicker if something bad happened or is about to happen and having little downtime—or no downtime.
The other is about new customer experiences (like Nest). There’s also new employee experiences that can happen in the enterprise world: Getting updates in the airport, on the airplane or in your car because you have this new service in your car that you didn’t have the night before.
Q: Why is VMware even messing with Internet of Things?
Mimi: VMware looks at IoT on two planes:
- We look at the content plane, which is the sexy stuff. It’s the analytics. It’s the applications. It’s what GE is doing and SAP and IBM and Watson. It’s all that sexy stuff that is delivering analytics and applications and doing machine learning.
- To do IoT right, with all the diversity of things that are out there, you have to have a control plane. And that’s where VMware fits in.
We fundamentally believe that what is happening in the data center today is going to extend all the way out to the edge. Whether it be at the endpoints with our smartphones and laptops like what we do with AirWatch or what we do today in the data center—we’re going to provide control all the way across: management, monitoring and security over all IoT.
Q: Where are we on that road to where IoT and corporations should be?
Mimi: It’s funny because I would’ve said you need about 10 years, but how quickly we’ve come with the autonomous vehicle—which I would’ve said 5 years, but we’re talking about a year from now, which is insane—I would say if enterprises are not looking at IoT today, they will lose in their industry.
I will be that bold because $255 billion will be spent by 2019. There are billions of dollars that companies are investing to look at IoT and how it will help them accomplish the most mission-critical objectives of their business.
Read more about IoT in the enterprise on the VMware End-User Computing Blog:
