There have been lot of emphasis laid by the organizations to be mobile ready and the challenges that a leader foresee is choosing the right technical platform and toolset to deliver the Mobile experience with secure and environment. This challenge has been there from the onset of smart phone and tablets nearly replacing the desktops for generic users.
Innovation and being connected was the theme and soon people realized that it is much beyond Mobile App and mobility being the focus area. Now we see every device that could bring in data to provide meaningful insight to life style, behavior is part of the wave as Internet of
Things (IOT).
The drive is already set for Business to prepare for the change, building better insight on customer behavior to deliver the best in class products and services. If we look at how we bring things together it is actually underlying data capture converting it to meaningful information and representing it to end users. The second stage comes in of generating insight on the captured data with analytics and co-relation of various data points captured. Business preparedness for the new age solution requires additional focus on Infrastructure readiness with special emphasis on environment security to maintain the privacy and accessibility of Information.
We have seen a lot of Technical architectural changes being brought in solutions creating monolithic systems to modularized solution further being specialized or customized solution to meet business needs. The focus with specialized and customized solution took the industry to focus on Integration which brought in the concept of SOA introducing the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus). Now with the introduction of IOT it is pertinent that we start talking about the EMB (Enterprise Message Bus) as one of the key component in our Architectural consideration. On the other hand the landscape needs to review the data strategy and introduce components that can support the demand of data growth requirement of IOT.
Enterprises would need to setup a Message Bus reviewing the architecture and look at solutions that support the MQTT lightweight messaging protocol for machine to machine connectivity. The protocol is used on top of TCP/IP and is now an OASIS standard with libraries available for almost all programming languages. It’s is built on publish/subscribe messaging pattern with a broker responsible for authentication, authorization and distribution to the intended clients. Due to its low footprint, small size it is the right fitment for unreliable and high latency networks suitable for small device communication.
With the setup of middleware as Enterprise Message Bus which is going to be exposed to Public network, review and strengthening of existing Network security would go hand in hand and some organization would also look forward for setting up message level security depending on the
business line.
The next big question to be addressed by the enterprises is to review the expected Data growth and the options available to setup the required infrastructure for storing the data generated through various connected devices which would further be analyzed to build the New Age service model and will serve the customer with information on their preferred devices enriching the overall
user experience.
The options which seem to be more viable to business entity would depend on the expected data to be captured and can range from setting up Hadoop in the enterprise environment or subscribing for Cloud services or even take a mixed approach to meet the scalability and performance needs.
The most challenging and important aspect of systems setup that would differentiate the enterprise in on the analyzing the gathered information and integrate it with the various systems/touch-points for generating behavior insight which would aide sales and determine service and support action.
IT in the enterprise has the challenge to keep up with the next wave and also work on optimizing the current costs considering the competition. It is pertinent that we review our existing Architecture and plan for future investment keeping in view that IOT generated information would soon be a part of your enterprise data which will help business take the User experience to Next level and ensure you do not lose out on the competition.
With data interpretation being one of the differentiator, IT function need to partner with Business and support in setting up a Data Analytics team which is supports the differentiation that Business entity brings in. The complexities of system would increase and so would business expectations, but for enterprise it is important for have the right investment plan drawn with progression towards the future state.