Business Leaders Say Yes to Internet of Things

Six Reasons Businesses Need to Pay Attention to Unstructured Data

Oh, boy, are we headed for a major data management fiasco.

ZDNet had the opportunity to attend a discussion by processor maker ARM. The discussion points included a recent survey that queried 779 senior business leaders about their plans for adopting Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Among the fun facts uncovered:

• Two-third of businesses either are in the process of incorporating IoT practices or have already.
• 96 percent of businesses expect to be using the IoT in some way within the next three years.
• Yet only 30 percent of the organizations have actually committed “double-digit” investments to the IoT effort.

Now think about that: The IoT is basically a lot of sensors, endlessly sending data over a wireless connection. Without an infrastructure plan, the chatter could overrun your systems. Plus, if you want to manage and interpret that data, you’re going to need a Big Data solution.

So I have to wonder how that’s going to happen when you haven’t even spent $10 on it.

I suspect business leaders are putting the IoT cart before the Big Data horse. I wish the survey had included CIOs, because it’d be interesting to learn whether CIOs feel prepared for the IoT.

Of course, it could be that business leaders expect to offload the data work. ZDNet notes:

“Based on the report, integrating the Internet of Things appears to mean implementing a combination of cloud, mobile and social services in order to both handle as well as make use of the abundant amounts of data being generated by these sources.”

I suspect we’ll hear a lot more about that integration challenge in 2014. So far, it’s been pretty quiet, but just last week, Informatica announced Informatica Vibe Data Stream for Machine Data, a new streaming data collection technology that collects and delivers data to Hadoop.