Living In An IOT World

Jonathan Ballon, Vice President in the Internet of Things Group (IOTG), Intel Corporation

- Zachary Chan

You’ve mentioned that IoT is the single biggest technology enabled opportunity in history. Can you elaborate a little on this?

We mostly think of the Internet as something we access through our phones, PCs, or tablets in the form of shopping, social media, and other services. But what IoT allows us to do is to instrument the data in our world. So, you’re taking data sources from a variety of different places in order to provide the next level of insight into those physical environments. In healthcare for example, the use of computer vision technology to perform better than human accuracy when interpreting images of the body in the form of MRIs.

And what’s accelerating IoT deployments are the tremendous advancements in AI that has taken place in the last couple of years.

But IoT deployments still feel like they’re in their infancy…

It’s like what William Gibson famously said, “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” The technologies are actually mature, but what we haven’t seen are standards or platforms emerge. The industry is still somewhat fragmented. There’re a lot of silo-ed deployment, where thousands of examples of IoT solutions that are adding value, but what we’re only now starting to see is a maturity to the point where you’re getting repeatable deployments; the same solution deployed in different organizations.

This has happened in the past year, and we (Intel) actually track this. We have a program called Market Ready Solutions that looks at how we can bring all the components necessary in order to deliver an IoT solution. If it has been deployed once, that’s cool and interesting, but if it has been deployed a dozen-two dozen times, then we know that this is a solution that has potential.