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"Internet of Things... The Opportunity for India"

Somshubhro Pal Choudhury, MD, Analog Devices India
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Somshubhro Pal Choudhury, MD, Analog Devices India
Analog Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADI) is a semiconductor company providing analog bridge to the digital world. Headquartered in Norwood, Massachusetts, the company has a current market cap of $15.64 billion.

To date mostly our personal computing devices like PCs, smart phones and tablets are connected to the Internet. With Internet of Things (IOT), it would be an explosion of 30 to 50 billion THINGS connected to the Internet by 2020. The current count of such devices as per Cisco's 'Internet of Everything' Connections Counter is 11.8 billion.

What does THINGS connected to the Internet mean? How would that help and what functions would they perform? The vision is of billions and trillions of sensors connected to humans, cars, machines, buildings, power grids, appliances and even animals, sensing critical information ranging from something as simple as temperature, to the vital signs of equipment, to the status of the environment and feeding the information via some network to a central location. Cloud Computing and Data Analytics then take over, crunching and making sense of the data, storing and pattern matching to make intelligent decisions and in few cases even feeding the decision back to an actuator to take an action.

IoT has four broad functional areas - Sensors, Network, Cloud and Data Analytics. IoT has every discipline of electronics, sensor technologies, networking, processing, cloud computing and data analytics involved and hence is an engineer's dream.

IOT is not something entirely new and in some form or shape is already deployed. Smart Meters are deployed with several power utility companies, sensing the energy consumption, power quality and outage real time and feeding the information to the utility's Network operating Center (NOC) for billing, demand response and outage management. Sea water level is being tracked for climate change in various sea level monitoring stations worldwide, feeding directly to a central Internet data center. This year Consumer Electronics Show (CES) saw a plethora of wearable medical gadgets reporting the vital signs and health of a person and counting every step a person takes, feeding the data back to the cloud for analytics and on the mobile app for visual representation.


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