IoT Investment Has to Begin Now

It’s been widely reported that the IoT market is expected to generate significant market opportunity – upwards of $267 billion — by 2020. Numbers aside, one of the main drivers is the rapid growth of IoT and connected devices consumed at both the consumer and industrial level, leading to an extreme side effect — a massive explosion of data. The amount of data created by all these devices is expected to reach 847 zettabytes per year by 2021.

The IoT potential can be limitless if businesses can identify and understand how these devices and the data they create affect people’s daily lives. Let’s look at a few examples of the opportunities ahead with IoT data.

Consider an energy exploration organization and its ability to uncover viable energy resources. What if they were able to visualize and analyze data from an unlimited source of sensor data points? It would make the process of finding natural resources much more efficient and equip their scientists with information of the highest degree of accuracy. This would change the way exploration is done, reducing the risks to the environment and potentially cutting down the time it takes to complete the process.

We’re witnessing more and more examples of IoT at work. Another example is a large delivery player, using thousands of delivery vehicles and staff to deliver packages to more than 150 million addresses.  The organization can use near real-time location data from connected devices to streamline delivery routes and reduce inefficiencies in distribution methods.

These are two examples of current IoT use cases. There are a lot of smart things out there.  Even a light bulb has an IP address behind it these days. It’s now or never to monetize IoT applications. It’s a good start for businesses to collect and store IoT data, but it’s more meaningful to understand it, analyze it and use the insights to improve efficiency and effect meaningful changes.

The unlimited potential of IoT carries across multiple industries that all stand to benefit from the technology and the data that comes with it, including saving energy, package route delivery optimization and predictive maintenance. A focus on location intelligence, advanced predictive analytics and the rise of streaming data analysis will undoubtedly drive a return on IoT investments.

Nima Negahban is co-founder and CTO of Kinetica