Summary: Know How Businesses Are Leveraging Their Business Power with the Help of the Internet of Things (IoT). They Are Paying Attention to It to Enhance Their Business Process and Ensuring Gain Long Term Success for Their Business in This Fiercely Competitive Market. 

In this IT era, the latest technology is making its way to our day to day life. It has influenced our life to a great extent and has also affected the way we work. Now we use different gadgets and modern equipment that ease our work and helps us to complete it more smoothly and accurately than ever before. The latest technology like Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence has slowly established its command across different industries. Apart from all these technologies one technology that gained significant importance is the internet of things (IoT), it has affected the different areas of various sectors to a great extent. 

The use of IoT enabled devices has enhanced the way people live their lives. According to Gartner's prediction, more than 25 billion IoT devices will be present in the market by 2021. The use of IoT will introduce new innovation for businesses, customers, and society. 

The potential growth in usage of IoT has resulted in improvement in various sectors like healthcare, education, entertainment, and many more. Now it has become possible to track assert in real-time, monitoring the ups and downs in the human body, home automation, environmental monitoring, etc have become easy and all thanks go to the internet of things (IoT). 

Internet of Things: Know Why Businesses Need It for Their Business?

As per the report by Cisco, more than 500 billion devices will be connected with the Internet by 2030. Each device that will be connected by the internet will include sensors that collect data by interacting with the environment and will communicate over a network very accurately. 

And all this will become possible through the Internet of Things (IoT) as it's the network of all these connected devices. These smart devices which are developed using this latest technology will generate data that IoT applications use to accomplish various tasks like deliver insight, analyze, aggregate which helps to respond much accurately as per user's actions. 

The internet of things is one such latest technology that is continuously improving with each passing second. As this technology connects multiple things with each other, it becomes possible for businesses to get real-time access to all the information on the network and thus it has been proved to be beneficial for them to improve their business processes. It provided multiple benefits to the businesses who adopt it, go through the list of benefits that IoT offers for your business. There are various advantages to explore when it comes to implementing the internet of things for your business. 

1. Offers a Large Amount of Data

Almost all businesses these days have realized the power of the internet of things and have started opting for the same for their business. As more and more businesses are stepping ahead to opt for this technology it is predicted that the total market value of IoT will grow rapidly and will reach $3 trillion by 2026. 

IoT enabled devices are able to collect huge data from the network with the help of added sensors. This information can be beneficial for businesses as they can easily know what their customers really want from them, how can they fulfill their demands in the best possible way, and much more. 

2. Better Customer Service 

Every business these days boil down to satisfy their customers and offer the best to them on their demand. The combo of IoT based devices with an app like spoitify can provide quick access to customers' behaviors. It helps businesses to analyze all the data which includes customers' preference, the time they spent on making a particular purchase, the language they prefer, and much more. 

All this information can help businesses to enhance their customer support and come up with an advanced solution that satisfies all their needs. Using this information you can diversify your business according to new market trends and grab all the opportunities that come your way. 

3. Ability to Monitor and Track Things

IoT enabled devices will allow all businesses to track and monitor each and every activity of their employees. They can easily know what their employees are working, how many tasks they have completed, what progress that has made, and much more. They can even share information with their employees in real-time about the current project on which they are working and can also get information from them whenever they want.  

4. Save Money and Resource

There is no doubt that machine to machine communication is growing dramatically in recent years. It is estimated that the total number of M2M connections will grow speedily from 5 billion to 27 billion from 2014 to 2024.

Machines have taken the place of the human in most of the business sector which save a huge amount of money and resources of businesses which they used to spend on human labor. Nowadays work like answering customers' queries, managing accounts, keeping other business records, and much more work in the business environment is performed by the latest application and software that has been developed using the latest technology like the internet of things or any other. 

5. Automation 

IoT helps businesses to find the best way to make their business process faster and better. They can let them know which areas to be automated so that they can reduce the task of the employees and can save a huge amount of time and resources of their business. If as a business entrepreneur if you feel that your business needs to be automated then IoT will analyze each and every area of your business and will let you know which can be automated and don't need human interaction. 

6. Helps to offer Personalized Experiences

As stated above, businesses can get all the information related to their ideal customers with the help of IoT enabled devices. They can know their purchase preferences, likes, dislikes, and much more and can try to provide a personalized experience. 

As per New Epsilon research, 80% of consumers like to make a purchase from a particular brand if and only if they offer personalized experiences to them. For example, businesses can develop accurate bills keeping in mind the analyzed IoT data and can provide various discounts and offers to the customers as more than 74% of customers expect that they will get automatic crediting for coupons and loyalty points. 

Wonders of the Internet of Things Have a Long Way to Go!

There are certain areas that are still untapped by businesses as they are unable to implement IoT technology in every aspect of their business environment. And even some of the businesses have yet not opted for this modern technology, due to which they are missing various opportunities that are in their success. There are various ways in which IoT works wonders for every business sector. As technology is evolving continually due to research and efforts of brilliant minds, there are certain changes that IoT will have much to offer to the businesses in the nearby future. 

When businesses implement the internet of things in their business they will experience enhancement in their employee's productivity, speed, and efficiency which will directly affect the business profit. Hence work on your business niche and find out whether you can implement IoT in your business environment or not. It’s the demand of time to stand out from others and you can do it using IoT, implement this technology in a basic way for your business if possible.

IoT has already enjoyed a next-big-thing status for several years now and all signs point to continued growth as homes, cars, and nearly every piece of hardware in our lives gets connected. But that doesn’t mean the industry isn’t facing challenges. In fact, rapid growth and its status as the new kid on the block, make IoT perfectly poised to face two particularly big challenges in the years to come.

Given the high demand for connected products, we need to solve these problems as quickly as possible. Late last year, Gartner analysts estimated that 2016 would see about 5.5 million new IoT devices connected every single day. But that’s nothing compared to what’s coming. Back in 2013, Cisco made headlines by predictingIoT will be a $14.4 trillion dollar industry by 2022. So what does the future of IoT look like? And what can we do now to better prepare for the connected future?

Developers aren’t ready for IoT

The first and perhaps easiest challenge to overcome is the talent supply problem. Most developers were not taught to write software for connected hardware. And up until very, very recently, developers were set in a desktop mindset. Speaking to our CTO at Mokriya, Pranil Kanderi, there are a few exceptions to this rule: “A small market share of embedded devices has been around for a while now,” Kanderi says. “But they were such a small segment that, for the most part, software developers kept the focus on desktops.”

Now, as consumers eagerly buy up new IoT products as quickly as they hit the market, the demand for developers who can write for connected hardware is growing fast. Moving from this desktop-first mentality to different kinds of hardware has been a slow process, Kanderi says. Too slow for an industry releasing new products every single week.

Here at Mokriya, our IoT business is a majority of the work we do. “If I have to guess, more than 70-80% of our projects so far have some kind of a connected device or hardware,” says Kanderi. “And that’s in addition to the mobile device itself.”

It wasn’t until IoT exploded in popularity that developers began to realize there was a lot of demand in the space with few developers ready to fulfil that demand. Now that we’re seeing this demand balloon, how much trouble is the industry in? How likely is it that developers can learn the new skills and approaches that engineering hardware to software challenges will require?

Kanderi says it’s probably not going to be as dramatic as it looks right now. “Developers now have physical hardware — Raspberry Pi, IoT kits, etc. — on their desks that they can write software for,” he says. “The real shift will be learning to think in terms of smaller distributed networked components.”

But the majority of software developers still rely on just a few platforms, like Java, .Net, and ERP. “As the connected devices grow, there will come a time when a lot of these developers will need to transition to write software for connected devices,” Kanderi points out. And that time is approaching. So, developers should start learning the most important software development skills in IoT immediately.

Thankfully, for good software developers who understand the basics of programming, this isn’t likely going to be a massive issue, Kanderi says. “Some of the same programming languages like Python, C, java, JavaScript can be used on hardware platforms like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Intel Edison.” Still, the relative silence on this issue within the industry is a bit troubling.

Fragmentation in connected hardware

What’s more worrisome in the long term is the unsolved issue of fragmentation within the industry. There are thousands of devices — with new products launching every week — and very few of them can communicate effectively. In order to really take advantage of the possibilities in connected hardware, we’re going to have to create a way for these products to come together.

The problem isn’t that this challenge has gone unnoticed, the opposite, actually. At this point, the larger issue is that too many tech enterprises have spotted the opportunity to become IoT’s universal hub and are currently fighting to build the budding industry around their own ecosystem. Google is expanding Google Homewhile Amazon is finding new ways to connect IoT products using Echo/Alexa. It comes as no surprise that these two giants have begun a very public initial battle to rule the smart home. And then there are organizations, like Chronicled, that are building open databases to connect IoT products. Earlier this month, even the giant consortium, AllSeen Alliance, announced a partnership with rival Open Connectivity Foundation.

There’s no way to tell how this will all turn out, partially because connected devices are still in such a nascent stage, but also due to increasing instances of tech brands partnering up with multiple IoT alliances at once. The fact that brands are hedging their bets is not a huge surprise, given the newness of the mainstream IoT industry, yet it does point to a greater uncertainty as we look toward the future of IoT. And while it’s in everyone’s interest to solve that problem together, the temptation of becoming the hub for all connected hardware in the future is too good for many brands to pass up altogether.

The lack of a common standard to communicate across various devices could be a major problem if we continue on this path. But either way, if you are developer its high time that you should look towards getting your hands on an IoT kit and start connecting with the future. 

Read about how Mokriya develops solutions for IoT problems