Category: Big Data

Realising value from the internet of everything

How will businesses benefit from the internet of everything?

How much opportunity does connecting all our machines to the internet really offer businesses and society?

Cisco’s Internet of Everything index released last week looks at one of the great opportunities facing today’s managers in realising business value in these new technologies .

On Cisco’s calculations, the internet of everything is worth over $14.4 trillion to the world economy and nearly half the business benefits are going wasted.

Germany and Japan lead the pack and, as discussed yesterday, Australia wallows between China and Russia.

Cisco comparison of countries
Cisco comparison of countries

Despite German businesses being the leaders, Cisco estimates $33bn, or nearly 40% of the potential gains, isn’t being realised even in that country.

How different industries are using the internet of machines is notable as well, with Cisco claiming the biggest benefits currently being realised by the IT industry while the greatest potential lies in the service, logistics and manufacturing industries.

cisco-internet-of-everything-value-index-by-industry
Internet of everything value by industry

If anything, these projections could be on the conservative side with Cisco estimating fifty billion devices connected to the net by 2020. Given the rate of smartphone being sold and everything from vending machines to clothing being online, it may well be ten or even a hundred times that number.

The real challenge for businesses in all these projections is how individual organisations can realise this value in their operations.

For some businesses, there’s plenty of existing opportunities with well established services in areas like field services and logistics tracking the locations of staff and packages. These are relatively simple to incorporate into existing operations.

In other applications, businesses will find things more complex as the connected devices will tie into analytics and Big Data plays. These won’t be simple.

One particularly important area for the workforce as a whole in business process automation where many tasks currently done by humans can be carried out by machines talking to each other.

This is already happening in fields like fast moving consumer goods and hospitality where stock levels can be automatically monitored and replacement stock ordered in without staff being involved. As the technology becomes more widespread this will threaten the roles of many previously well paid managers.

Many of those managers though will be challenged anyway unless they’re prepared to deal with the changes that internet of things is bringing to their businesses.

How do you think the internet of everything will change your business?

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Coming to your city – the internet of machines

A chart by sensor manufacturer Libelium illustrates how the internet of machines is growing

An intriguing infographic from Spanish sensor manufacturer Libelium – which to Australian ears sounds like a new age defamation law firm – illustrates how the internet of things is being used in all walks of life from shipping containers to park benches.

The notable thing about the diagram is pretty well all of the sensor applications have been available for years – in some cases decades – and its only with the arrival of cheap sensors and pervasive internet access that widespread monitoring has becoming possible.

Libelium smart world infographic

With affordable, even disposible, sensors coupled with internet projects like Google Loon and Australia’s National Broadband Network, these networks are now possible at a price that won’t sink a government’s budget.

In fact these sensor networks will probably improve councils’ and governments’ budgets as they promise to improve the efficiency of services like rubbish collection and street repairs.

The real challenge is managing all the data this equipment gathers, that’s going to be one of the big jobs of the next decade.

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702 Sydney – Green computing and how we’re being watched online

On 702 SydneyLinda Mottram and I talk about Internet spying and green computing.

This morning on 702 Sydney I’m talking to Linda Mottram about Internet spying and green computing.

How Green is the internet looks at the claims from Google and other companies about cloud computing’s energy use.

The Internet snooping story broke two weeks ago with The Guardian NSA files.

An early part of the story was abot the use of the telephone company metadata – information about phone calls, not the actual content which intelligence agencies and law enforcement can use to draw a picture from.

For Australians, there’s additional cause for concern as the Telecommunications Act gives government agencies the powers to access anyone’s information.

If you’re worried about the way data is being collected about you online. Duck Duck Go is a secure, private browser and Box Free IT has some great suggestions on securing cloud computing services.

For those who want to seriously cover their online tracks, the Tor project and PGP encryption are more advanced privacy tools.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 222 702 or post a question on ABC702 Sydney’s Facebook page.

If you’re a social media users, you can also follow the show through twitter to @paulwallbank and @702Sydney.

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How Green is the Internet?

What are the environmental costs of the internet, cloud computing and big data?

Earlier this month Google hosted “How Green is the Internet?“, a summit which looked at the environmental costs of the connected society and technologies like cloud computing and Big Data.

The environmental impact of the internet and related technologies is a subject worth exploring, like all industries there are real costs to the planet which usually aren’t bourne by those who make the profits or reap the benefits.

In complex modern supply chains which often span the globe, the costs are not often apparent either. What appears to be a relatively clean, innocuous product to city consumers could have terrible environmental consequences for others.

Google’s summit is a good example of overlooking many external costs in that most of the conversations looked at reducing energy usage, understandable given the company’s dependence on power hungry data centres which drive their cloud computing services.

move-to-cloud-cost-savings-on-the-internet

Energy usage is important in the discussion about digital technologies – the businesses of bits and bytes almost wholly relies upon having constant and reliable electricity supplies and power generation is one of the most environmentally damaging activities we engage in.

Focusing on energy consumption though is not the only aspect we need to look at when examining how green the internet is, there’s many other costs in building the supply chain that enables us to watch funny cat videos in our homes or offices.

The entire supply chain is complex and the session on infrastructure costs by Jon Koomey of Stanford University touched on this; there’s the environmental costs of building data centres, of manufacturing routers, of laying cables and – probably the most difficult question of all – what do we do with the e-waste generated by obsolete equipment.

Little of this was touched on in the Google conference and it’s interesting that the tech industry is focusing on the energy costs while overlooking other effects of a global, complex industry.

That isn’t to say the energy story isn’t valid. A number of the Google speakers emphasized the indirect energy saving costs as cloud computing and Big Data allows more intelligent business decisions that make industries and daily life more efficient.

A favourite example is the use of car parking apps where drivers save energy and reduce pollution because they aren’t driving around looking for the parking spaces. This puts Google’s acquisition of traffic app Waze into perspective.

Reducing driving times is just one area of where the internet is improving energy efficiency and these are important factors when considering the ‘greenness’ of the web.

However without considering the full impact of building, maintaining and disposing the equipment that we need to operate the internet, we aren’t really looking at the entire impact the internet is having on the planet.

Google’s conference though is a good starting point for that discussion which is one that every industry should be having.

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Smart cities and the sensors in your pocket

Community wide sensors promise to change government

National Public Radio’s Parallels program has story on how the Spanish city of Santander is wiring itself as a ‘smart city’ with a network of sensors wiring everything from garbage bins to parking spots.

The hope with the sensors is they’ll will improve local government’s services, allowing things like more efficient garbage collection and better pricing of parking meters.

What’s notable about the story is that smartphones are included as ‘sensors’ with Santander residents being able to submit data from their handsets.

The idea of smartphones as sensors isn’t new — pothole reporting apps were early to the iPhone — the increased sophistication of handsets and improved tracking technology is making them more powerful.

So we have another Big Data problem with local councils being flooded with information.

Processing all this information is going to require the community pitching in so the data is going to have to open.

Once governments make the data open it also creates opportunities for smart entrepreneurs to create new services and technologies.

Creating new opportunities is a hope of government sensor programs around the world, including Tasmania’s Sense-T project .

With factors like water quality and weather being monitored, existing sectors become more efficient and new industries are being created.

Hopefully the urge to hoard this rich, community data will be resisted by governments.

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Big data’s big truths

There’s a lot of hype around Big Data but it doesn’t mean we should ignore the risks or opportunities.

One thing former Obama 2012 campaign CTO Harper Reed cannot be accused of is subtlety so his statement at the Sydney CeBIT conference last week that Big Data is Bullshit wasn’t wholly surprising.

Reed has a good point – like all IT industry buzzwords there is a fair degree of hype and BS around Big Data although his referring to it as a storage problem misses the point.

Data storage is a problem largely solved; when we’re talking about Big Data today, we’re talking more about analysing the information and managing the life cycle of an organisation’s data.

Not that these issues are new, the tech industry has been dealing with the challenges of storing, managing and analysing data since computers first appeared. In fact, that’s the reason computers were invented.

An excellent NY Times Bits blog post expands on Harper’s views and rebuts many of the myths and hype around big data.

Most important is the point that big data is not the truth, we can torture those bits and bytes to tell us anything we like.

Claims that Big Data can tell us everything or that it will conquer discrimination and make cities smarter are fanciful. It all depends on how we choose to use the data.

There are downsides with Big Data too — we live in an age where it’s easier to let the algorithm do the work and if the computer says ‘no’, then we can shrug and say “sorry it’s beyond our control.”

Letting the algorithms run our lives is one of many risks, but it doesn’t change the opportunities for businesses, governments and communities Big Data presents. If we can understand our world better, we can do smarter things.

That’s the real opportunity with Big Data and we don’t need the hype to tell us that.

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ABC 702 mornings – Storage and your computer

How we deal with the information explosion in the age of Big Data is the topic of today’s 702 Sydney segment with Linda Mottram

This morning on 702 Sydney I’m talking to Linda Mottram on the decidedly unsexy topic of storage – hard drives, cloud computing and the struggle to keep up with ever expanding file sizes of documents, photos and downloads.

It’s an opportunity to revisit the How Much Data Does The Internet Need topic which I covered for Radio National last year, although almost certainly that needs updating.

Earlier this year networking vendor Cisco released its 2013 Virtual Networking Index which forecast global data traffic growing fourteen fold over the next five years.

Those bytes slopping around the internet have to come to rest on someone’s hard drive and this is what’s driving the storage crisis.

Yesterday US business site Venture Beat had an op-ed by an executive from Seagate, the world’s biggest hard drive manufacturer where he discussed the storage challenges with a claim from industry consultants IDC that worldwide computer storage is 2.7 zettabytes.

A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes, or ten followed by twenty zeros – it’s the equivalent of a billion one terabyte hard drives that are standard on most cheap desktop computers.

Where those hard drives are located is the big challenge, is it on your laptop, smartphone or on a somewhere on a cloud service?

The other big challenge is what do you do with all this information – which is where the Big Data discussion comes in.

While data storage is a mundane topic, it’s a big one that matters. I hope you can tune in.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 222 702 or post a question on ABC702 Sydney’s Facebook page.

If you’re a social media users, you can also follow the show through twitter to @paulwallbank and @702Sydney.

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