Article: How the Internet of Things will transform industry and society?

By 2020, there could be as many as 100 billion internet-connected objects around the world. What effect will this have on industry and society?

The industry has always relied on utility-specific protocols for its operational data exchange. But for the past 15 years, it has been moving towards the digital world. Let us take, for example, the IEC 61850: a protocol and object model used for communication between Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) within a substation, or between IEDs and a control center. This data model is now mapped on RESTful web services, and transmitted over TCP/IP and 3GPP networks. So we can infer that internet standards have already largely impacted utility connectivity solutions. Beyond connectivity, Network Management Systems (NMS) will become a key component of the IoT. Utility providers will have to manage heterogeneous communications systems – multi-vendor, multi-protocol networks with varying quality of service constraints. The NMS for utilities will benefit from the telecommunications industry, which has already dealt with issues of scalability, the need to support legacy protocol and devices, security, integration with back office and information presentation. The IoT will rely on platforms that can process a large volume of data and enable the building of applications and services. Here again, the platforms developed for the telecom industry will offer the required functionalities at the lowest cost, using the latest internet technologies for cloud and service offerings. An advantage of using this type of platform is that energy service providers may, where regulation allows, offer a bundle of services in a similar way.