The Internet of Things is neither hype nor hope, but moving to a world of billions of interconnected, secure, easy-to-use devices with a profitable business model is anything but simple.
That was the consensus of a panel here (March 14) at Bluetooth World that explored that very "hype or hope" question.
“Why not both and why not neither?” panelist David McCall, chair of the Liaison Task Group of the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC), responded.
The five panelists, led by moderator Mark Powell, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, dived into IoT evolution aspects such as security, user interface, standards (or lack thereof), scalability and notion of device and network orchestration.
“There is a lot of hard work, a lot of difficult problems that need to be solved,” McCall said. “Yes, there is hype, but if you think this thing isn’t going to happen, you’re wrong.”
The fragmented nature of IoT applications and development is a key area that needs to be addressed.
Charlene Marini, vice president of segment marketing with ARM (pictured right), said scale will only come if IoT thinking becomes less siloed.
“We are seeing pockets of connected systems, connected back to the cloud, and an end user is analyzing the data and making real-time decisions based on the information being sensed in some environment. A lot more needs to be done to get the scale we're looking for.”
The industry also needs to offer the consumer an environment in which she doesn’t have to download an app for every point task, such as controlling a lighting system in the home.
To this point, Wayne Piekarski, Google’s senior developer advocate, said we need to think more about orchestration and how to serve consumer interests. Rather than have a consumer walk into his home opening different apps to trigger the lights, washing machine and television, orchestration would occur the moment the homeowner walks inside, automatically or programmatically activating or deactivating connected technologies based on experience, time of day, and so on.
“You want to have these generic schemas so an app developer can write the app and the OEM makes the devices,” he said. “We want to try to decouple that because it allows for interesting orchestration possibilities.”
Silos are also what the industry needs to address to nail down end-to-end security for IoT, panelists agreed.
Security is “everyone’s responsibility,” said Adnan Nishat, senior product manager of IoT wireless Products for Silicon Labs.
When a security attack happens, it may damage a particular brand or company but it certainly weakens consumer trust, which impacts everyone, he said.
Marini noted that IoT is an outgrowth of embedded systems design, which originally were vertically conceived and implemented in “very siloed value chains.”
“IoT means all of that is broken apart,” she said. So how do you have security in an open environment — an environment where you’re mixing and matching value chains?
“We need to enable security end to end, to have trust, integrity of the device, to ensure that even tiny bits of data coming from good known devices are secure and to have security all the way to the edge.”
The security solutions need to be simple enough that any part of the value chain can implement them. The industry's working on that at every level, Marini added.