Last month, I was fortunate to be able to attend the HxGN Live 2019 conference, where Hexagon CEO Ola Rollén explored the idea of how data can save the world. While on the surface this may seem like a fluffy, feel good but over the top headline for a keynote, the reality is that data has been at the heart of humankind’s discoveries and inventions for thousands of years.
Today unlocking and leveraging the power of data is also why more than 90% of companies surveyed worldwide are pursuing Internet of Things strategies. Empowered by data from connected machines and sensors, organizations can unlock greater productivity, reduce waste and identify new solutions and opportunities that can all ultimately contribute to a more sustainable and efficient planet.
Declining costs of connectivity technologies and improvements in wireless communications have made it easier than ever to connect machines and sensors. By 2025, IDC predicts that amount of data generated annually will reach 175 zettabytes (or 175 trillion gigabytes) worldwide and a substantial portion of this will be created by connected machines. This data volume will be beyond the scope of every human being to consume and process.
If data is key to saving the world, effective data management will be key to making sure that we have the right information at the right time to leverage it effectively. In the IoT world, this means that:
Machine data flows must be automated and rules-driven to ensure that the right data gets to the right applications at the right time.
Machine data must be able to be easily integrated with the enterprise workflow – in other words, machine data must be able to interact with data from the heterogeneous machine network and enterprise business applications to create new insights.
The need for direct human intervention in transporting machine data into the enterprise workflow or other applications must be minimized or eliminated all together.
Today, recent estimates find that up to 73% of data in the enterprise is lost, untouched or never utilized. For IoT deployments, the difficulty lies not in connecting machines and sensors – but in developing the custom applications and firmware that can extract, transport and manage the data in the IoT machine network. At Machinechat, our focus is on solving this problem to make it easier and faster for IoT solution architects to deploy projects and accelerate their path to ROI. Because the world needs saving – and we don’t have any time to waste.
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