The Internet of Things has achieved a high level of buzz recently. Everything from our cars, pets and toasters will be connected to the Internet.
Big companies selling processors, networking equipment and other hardware are pushing hard for IoT standards. Although many big companies are proposing and setting standards, small ISVs are best positioned to innovate.
Perhaps the biggest opportunity for innovation is not in the things but in the services provided to access, track and manage those things. Some ISVs are positioned to take advantage of IoT because they are already providing related software services and analytics that can be scaled to track many more data sources in a huge number of things.
Some speculate that we will eventually be talking about an Internet of Services instead of Things. That idea has been around for a decade or more. Remember Web Services and Software Agents back in the 1990s? Parts of them remain as elements of service-oriented architectures in software applications rather than as a vibrant economy of pay-per-use services that never completely emerged. Is now the time for autonomous software agents using machine learning algorithms processing sensor inputs from millions or billions of things? Maybe.
Unfortunately there are very few software engineers on the market today who have the experience required to create IoT applications. Implementing IoT technology is true R&D which the big outsourcing companies do not do well. Can you really find IoT experts at a software outsourcing company?
Yes. Whether you are creating Skynet or something more modest, several certified Accelerance partners have experience creating IoT applications. Some of them have grown into this area from the direction of developing embedded software and firmware solutions and other partners come from the big data and analytics space. Both are applicable to IoT.
Examples include a partner in Hungary (photo) that developed wearable sensors that can also be attached to physical objects like equipment and robots to track and reposition their locations. A certified partner in India is implementing an IoT solution for controlling HVAC systems. And a partner in Belarus has expertise in predictive analytics and Business Intelligence. Their data scientists lead a team of machine learning specialists that is ready for commercial IoT projects.
There’s a lot happening with IoT around the world with conferences, hardware and real software development expertise you can take advantage of. Get beyond the buzz into real solutions using global software outsourcing today.