Is the “Internet of Things” a buzz word? We shared some insights on confusion in the market with defining the IoT. But whether it’s marketing-speak or not, you know the technology behind it is for real when major enterprises are investing in it. DELL announced recently a $1 billion dollar investment over the next several years. Earlier this week, the behemoth in cloud computing, Amazon, launched a number of new IoT features and products.
Not unlike many enterprises, Amazon also considers IoT a ‘buzzword.” According to Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy who stated, “Of all the buzzwords of choice, that we’ve been working on at AWS, IoT might be delivering the fastest in terms of the actual number of companies doing real work there,” He continued, “We’re now just entering a world where the growth in number of [connected] devices is going to be exponential.”
This week Amazon announced the launch of three, new IoT products including:
- New operating system for IoT devices called Amazon FreeRTOS. This OS is designed for connected devices without a CPU, only MCU, like smoke detectors. It comes with libraries, enabling local and cloud connectivity, as well as security. It’s open-source, and available on GitHub, and should eventually include over-the-air updates.
- Amazon One-Click. One-click allows the creation of AWS Lambda triggers for IoT devices that will help enterprises create specialized IoT systems more conveniently.
- Amazon IoT Device Management. This product, per Amazon, “makes it easy to securely on-board, organize, monitor, and remotely manage IoT devices at scale.”
Buzzword? Based on the projections I have been reading, the increasing number of VC investments and the volume of companies entering this space, I believe the Internet of Things is positioned for significant growth and greater adoption in 2018. I witnessed the rise of the “Cloud” with similar questions around it’s buzziness and yet it continues to scale. It seems that the IoT is scaling even faster and with greater force across industries.
