International. More than 8,000 participants from 70 countries (50% higher than the 2015 meeting), have gathered in the 3 days of celebration of the second edition of IoT Solutions World Congress 2016; the event focused on IoT for industrial applications, organized by Fira de Barcelona, in which analysts and leading companies from around the world have participated.
In this regard, he highlighted the participation of Jonathan Ballon, vice president and general manager of Intel Internet of Things Group, who offered the vision of the organization in the evolution of such an extraordinarily changing ecosystem.
"The industry is evolving at great speed and will continue to do so in the coming years in a context in which the role of the Device and the Fog computing architecture, together with cloud computing procedures, responds to the trajectory adopted by the market related to IoT applications in the industry." Ballon assures that in the evolutionary journey that involves moving from the Internet of Things (IoT) to the Internet of All Things (IoE), expanding its scope to reach virtually all domains, "the use of massive processing and analytical systems becomes essential, along with increasingly shorter response times," he said.
The promise of 5G connectivity
The 5G connectivity standard will play a transcendental role in the Internet of Things ecosystem, given that it is a technology that can be implemented in countless systems, devices and data centers, and represents the infrastructure on which large volumes of unstructured information will be transmitted in real time. "The arrival of 5G brings with it the promise of reaching gigabyte per user simultaneously and, at the M2M level, we will have hundreds of thousands of machines operating in Wi-Fi environments empowered by 5G connectivity technology," predicts Jonathan Ballon.
Intel's bet on IoT, according to its top representative, has to do with the device, the network, the data center, the cloud, and also with the communications and security that this architecture has to connect from end to end. "This type of platform will involve the participation of preferred developers, who will have to deal with aspects of resistance, scalability and security, all of which will lead to a great "repeatability" of the solutions allowing users to reproduce and scale it with ease.
New clouds, new users, new types of data...
Dell Technologies is another pivotal company in the industrial application Internet of Things landscape. John Roese, CTO of the organization at a global level, recognized at the IoT congress in Barcelona the need to build the right infrastructures that are capable of supporting the arrival of new clouds, new types of data as well as new types of users.
"In addition to moving towards more advanced infrastructures, we have to develop new applications and ways of making use of the data, and place them in the devices that will track the information. Dell Technologies is focused on the first stage of this innovation journey: our core business is based on the development of the necessary technological infrastructure that makes it possible to implement Internet of Things applications that communicate with sensors. To do this, we have a large ecosystem of partners that develop IoT platforms, without neglecting the central part of technology such as companies that build clouds, data analytics systems, infrastructure, and gateway devices." The future of IoT is seen by Roese in the key of a wave of companies that will adopt Internet of Things technology for the establishment of new types of businesses. "Entire industries such as healthcare, banking, automotive or the production chain have already come a long way in IoT," says Roese.
IoT platforms that think, reason and learn
For its part, another major industry player present at the congress such as the Blue Giant, pointed out through its maximum representative in the IoT panorama, Nicola Villa, executive partner and Europe leader, internet of Things of IBM, the need to establish Internet of Things platforms that are capable of thinking. "IBM's strategic vision in IoT is based on establishing a cross-action in which we have invested around 3,000 million dollars in the last year in R&D to develop a type of platforms that extracts data from the layer corresponding to the sensors, which uses an advanced system for the capture and management of the data in the information system, and that it has Watson analytics capabilities. With this, our IoT platform becomes a system that is able to understand, reason and also learn in a certain environment." Villa also pointed out that IBM is dedicating significant research and development efforts to optimize industrial applications of the Internet of Things applied to the retail and telecom sectors.
Microsoft also had a prominent participation in the IoT SWC 2016 event. Sam George, global director of Azure IoT, did not hesitate to travel to Spain to present the new functionalities of Azure and Windows 10, equipped with new features to help users simplify the way they monitor and manage their IoT solutions. In addition, Microsoft also took advantage of its presence at the event to announce new features in Windows 10 IoT Core, the operating system for low-cost devices, so that users have all the security and connectivity they expect from the Windows ecosystem in the field of devices that make up the Internet of Things.
In the industrial application Internet of Things infrastructures that could be seen working in IoT SWC 2016, the presence of three common elements could be seen in all of them: an architecture that includes the cloud, the intervention of a complete network infrastructure that connects devices and sensors, and analytical processes that have to come into play in real time at the other end of the network, which must allow a diagnosis to be made in a matter of milliseconds.
IoT SWC consolidates itself as the global reference event in the industry
The entry of the Internet of Things into the daily life of consumers – in the form of wearables that monitor vital signs, or through the control and management capabilities of sensors located in smart homes or connected cars --, has run parallel to the advances achieved in the IoT ecosystem applied to the industrial field. In this context, the IoT SWC event emerges as an innovation hub that, in its second edition, has served to place on the map and value the Internet of Things applications that are developed in a lesser-known scenario such as the industry.
After the second edition of the Internet Of Things Solutions World Congress (IoT SWC), held in Barcelona from 25 to 27 October 2016, the event organized by Fira de Barcelona is confirmed as an epicenter of immense value in the scenario of innovation in the industrial sector related to the ecosystem of the internet of things applied to smart cities, manufacturing, transport and logistics, healthcare and energy supply as well as the management of organisations. The important announcements made throughout the meeting, together with the intense activity recorded throughout the three days of conferences, position IoT SWC as the most important international business platform around industrial IoT in the world.
This is demonstrated by the growth that the congress has registered in the number of attendees (8,000 congressmen in the 2016 edition, compared to the little more than 4,500 registered in the 2015 edition), from 70 countries, and the presence of 172 exhibiting firms. The third meeting of IoT Solutions World Congress will take place in Barcelona from 3 to 5 October 2017.
