How to Build a Business-Ready Internet of Things: Standardization
This is Part Three of PCMag's trend overview, breaking down the enterprise IoT landscape through the lens of this year's Mobile World Congress. Check out Part One on enterprise use cases here and Part Two on IoT security here.
The Internet of Things (IoT) was one of the top-billed themes at Mobile World Congress this year, but the enterprise side of the space was one of the quieter, more interwoven trends revealed at the show. The shiny consumer IoT devices—smart home, wearables, connected cars, cute little robots—they were the IoT front men, lining the sensory-overloaded aisles of the Fira Gran Via in Barcelona. But if you walked past an enterprise tech giant on the show floor, the odds were good you'd pass a wall-sized poster or infographic about Intel, SAP, VMware, or HP Enterprise's "IoT cloud" or "IoT services solution." In fact, the odds were good you'd hear about any product capitalizing on the back-end cloud, infrastructure, security, and ecosystem-full of related services sprouting up around the new ecosystem of business and consumer devices.
There are three big boxes to check off if you're going to call your company's IoT solution enterprise-ready: security, interoperability, and a good enough value proposition. The tech you deploy should feed you back data and analytics, or be able to produce a tangible business advantage that actually makes a difference to your bottom line.
Part One of this feature broke down some of the biggest IoT applications we're seeing in business tech right now. Part Two delved into how companies are working to solve all of the different levels of the IoT security equation. The final piece of the story digs into some of most prominent IoT standardization efforts available, and how blockchain (another space we've been watching closely lately) might be the answer to some of the toughest IoT execution riddles: interoperability, identity, authentication, and security, all wrapped up in a distributed, immutable ledger.