I recently had the privilege of attending a Tech Summit held at Synnex where they brought together some of the biggest technology providers, Avaya, Dell, Microsoft, Google and Red Hat, to give us their perspective on where technology is taking us and what we should all being doing to prepare ourselves for the wave of network architecture, lovingly called the 3rd Platform. Essentially it revolves around the explosion of Mobility, Big Data, Social Media and Unified Communications which is being fueled by the Internet of Things (IoT) and the plethora of devices that are having these low-cost chips/sensors installed in them.
The industry analysts and pundits have decided that 2020 (probably because they prefer to start with a new decade) will be the next big inflexion point that we need to be ready for as the predictions is that IoT will grow from 15B devices generating about $1.5 Trillion in 2015 to over 30B devices and $3 Trillion in revenue in 2020. What makes this interesting is that these numbers have also been shared by Cisco and Citrix, which I had also posted in this blog in previous weeks. It’s not often that these or any other large organization will agree on anything (especially on how to execute) but this does give us a clear warning of what is about to be driven to by our insatiable appetite for connectivity.
The featured sponsor of this particular event was Avaya and what I found most interesting was that there was absolutely no mention of telephony, which is how most of us (including this grizzled 30+ year telecom veteran) know Avaya from and instead they presented us their view of how this future network will becoming vastly smarter by taking advantage of the intelligence of IoT devices that will be surrounding us just around the corner. Besides some of the obvious devices that we have already started to see leading us to a smarter digital world are cameras, door locks, audio speakers/microphones to provide alerting and/or lockdown capabilities in case of incidents (which we have seen way too often lately) which can be deployed instantly. The applications and verticals are virtually endless as this can be utilized for Public Safety, Education, Healthcare, Hospitality, Banking or Transportation just to name a few possibilities.
What was also interesting in how Avaya plans on implementing and managing all of these types of devices is via SIP which can also be managed by unique profiles and will also be integrating Software Defined Networking (SDN), which Cisco and Citrix/NetScaler are also using SDN to allow these devices to connect via the Internet and not require MPLS as mentioned in my previous blogs. For those of you who are starting to see the barrage of devices starting to cascade your networks including BYOD, the timing just might be right to start determining how your organization will be meeting the challenges of this type of scale, sounds daunting doesn’t it?
Finally with all of these devices viewing/measuring/detecting/analyzing/uploading all of these analytics, where does that leave privacy and security concerns with all of this data? We’ll probably leave this for another blog but that is something that has to be addressed as you put your plans together. I welcome your feedback or ideas and suggestions as 2020 is not that far away and would like to be able to assist you or your organizations efforts, so you can contact me at Glen.Benjamin@direclogix.com.
IoT Metrics Slide – Provided by Avaya
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