SMART CONNECTED THINGS
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ite
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ap
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Harbor Research was recently given the opportunity to examine a new application
development platform that takes a refreshingly new approach to integrating smart
devices, people, systems and the physical world. ThingWorx leapfrogs the current
machine-to-machine (M2M) market’s noise and clutter about device connectivity
by viewing core application development, device management and
collabora-tion for smart connected systems as a unified challenge that can be addressed by
a single, scaleable solution. In so doing, ThingWorx is re-defining the concept of
connected platforms and creating a new market meta-category.
T
echnologically, the 21st Century began with a very big
bang; two major technology developments have evolved
that are now on a path of convergence—The Internet of
Things and The Internet of People. The collaboration
technologies collectively driving social networking and
Enterprise 2.0 and beyond are spreading throughout the Internet
driving an unprecedented wave of growth. Meanwhile, intelligent
device networking - “The Internet of Things” - is upon us. Billions of
devices, are currently being connected to the Internet. The types of
devices being connected today extend far beyond the laptops and
cell phones we have become so accustomed to. Today, virtually
all products that use electricity—from toys and coffee makers to
cars and medical diagnostic machines—possess inherent data
processing capability. Any manufactured object has the potential
to be networked.
The Advent of Smart Connected Systems and Services
In its simplest form, Smart Systems is a concept in which input—from machines, people, sensors, video streams, maps, newsfeeds and more—is digitized and placed onto net-works. These inputs are integrated into systems that connect people, things, processes, and knowledge to enable collective awareness, creativity and better decision making. We prefer “Smart Connected Systems” over other terms in common use—notably “M2M,” which usually stands for “machine-to-machine”—because it captures the pro-found enormity of the phenomenon - something much greater in scope than just machine connectivity.
These phenomena are not just about people communicating with people or machines communicating with machines; it also includes people communicating with machines, and machines communicating with people. Smart connected devices are a global and economic phenomenon of unprecedented scale - potentially billions if not trillions of nodes. Soon, any device that is not networked will rapidly decrease in value, creating even greater pressure to be online. Consider the following:
Today the number of connected devices on the planet is surpassing the number of more sensors on earth than people;
A single large chemical plant produces more data in a day than the New York Stock Exchange and AMEX combined;
Estimates of data produced by the so-called Smart Grid could reach between 35 and 1000 petabytes per year.
Whatever we chose to call it -- “Smart Systems” or “Pervasive Computing” or “The Internet of Things” — we are referring to digital microprocessors and sensors embedded in everyday objects. But even this makes too many assumptions about what the smart systems phenomenon will be. Encoded infor-mation in physical objects is also smart—even without intrin-sic computing ability. Seen in this way, a printed bar code, a
house key, or even the pages of a technical manual can have the status of an “information device” on a network. For that matter, all of these characterizations do not even begin to address the human-machine dimension of collaboration.
But very few people are thinking about smart connected systems on that level. Current IT and telecom technologists are operating with outdated models of data, networking and information management that were conceived in the mainframe and client-server eras and cannot serve the needs of a truly connected world. “Smart Systems” should automatically be understood as “real-time networked information and computation,” but it isn’t. The Internet’s most profound potential lies in the integration of smart machines, information systems and people—its ability to connect billions upon billions of smart sen-sors, devices, and ordinary products into a “digital nervous system” that will smoothly interact with individuals and systems. The nature and behavior of a truly distributed global information system are concerns that have yet to really take center stage—not only in business communities, but in most technology communities, too.
Enter ThingWorx
thinking about the scope and on the scale that Smart Systems deserves—ThingWorx. business, we have not encountered very many compelling visions about the complete integration of things, people, systems and the real-time world. The ThingWorx team of in-novators understand that the tools we are working with today to make products “smart” on networks were not designed to handle the scope of new capabilities and interactions.
By 2020 there will be
more than 50 billion
smart devices on
networks
ThingWorx’ connected application platform is not a simple incremental improvement, true shift in thinking about how devices, people and physical systems will be integrated and how they will interact. The ThingWorx approach is not about leveraging aging IT platform for interactions to which any PERSON or any THING can contribute, and which liberates information interactions by abandoning traditional relational databasing and the client-server computing model.
At the same time, taking this initiative seriously does not mean junking all current IT prac-tice in one fell swoop. The pillars of present-day information technology will not crumble overnight, nor has the great existing investment in them suddenly lost all value. There assumptions and practices of the mainframe and PC eras are now decades old and not suitable for the smart systems era.
Figure 1: Connected Platforms Drive Collaboration Between People, Devices & Systems
3D Collaboration
Devices
People
M2M and Classical IT Technology Only Tells Part of the Story
Before delving into the new thinking that makes this story possible, let’s talk about why it’s necessary at all. The IT and telecom sectors have failed to re-evaluate their relation-ship to advancing technology and to their constituents. The business and technology paradigms to which these industries cling today are far too limiting, too cumbersome and too expensive to foster and sustain new growth.
From a Telco perspective, today’s discussions of M2M systems focus almost exclusively on communications -- the “pipe” -- and very little on the information value. In other words, on things that look good to the carriers. There are many
pop-ular visions about wireless monitoring and wireless control. Such as it is, wireless is a fantastic new advance -- no ques-tion. But, focusing on the communication element alone as end of the technology stick. Wireless communications alone steals the limelight and potentially eclipses the real revolution -- utilizing new networking technologies and processes to liberate information from sensors and intelligent devices to leverage collective awareness and intelligence.
From an IT perspective, today’s corporate IT function is a direct descendent of the com-pany mainframe, and works on the same “batched computing” model—an archival mod-el, yielding a historian’s perspective. Information about events is collected, stored, que-ried, analyzed, and reported upon. But all after the fact.
-chines” into systems that continually compare machine-state to sets of rules and then do something on that basis. In short, for connected devices to mean anything in business, the prevailing corporate IT model has to change.
The next cycle of technology and systems development in the smart connected systems arena is supposed to be setting the stage for a multi-year wave of growth based on the convergence of innovations in software architectures; back-room data center operations; wireless and broadband communications; and smaller, more powerful client devices connected to personal, local and wide-area networks. But is it?
What’s Required
....
When it comes to preparing for the global information economy of the 21st century, most people assume that “the IT and telco technologists are taking care of it.” They take it on faith that the best possible designs for the future of connected things, people, sys-tems and information will emerge from large corporations and centralized authorities. But those are big, unfounded assumptions. In fact, most of today’s entrenched players are showing little appetite for radical departures from current practice. Yet current practice
The tools we are using to
make products “smart” on
networks today were not
designed to handle the
complexity they are being
required to support
What are the major obstacles that need to be overcome?
Leveraging collective intelligence: For all its sophistication, many of today’s M2M systems are a direct descendent of the traditional cellular telephony model where each device acts in a “hub and spoke” mode. The inability of today’s popular enterprise systems to interoperate and perform well with distributed heterogeneous The many “nodes” of a network may not be very “smart” in themselves, but if they are networked in a way that allows them seamlessly, they begin to give rise to complex, system-wide behavior. This allows an entirely new order of intelligence to emerge from the system as a whole— an intelligence that could not have been predicted by looking at any of the nodes individually. What’s required is to shift the focus from simple device monitoring to a model where device data is aggregated into new applications to achieve true systems intelligence.
Automated development: When calls were routed through switchboards and had to be connected by a live operator. It was long ago forecast that if way, soon everybody in the world would have to be a switchboard operator. Of course that has not happened, because automation was built into the systems to handle common tasks like connecting calls. We are quickly approaching analogous circumstances with the proliferation of smart connected devices. Each new device requires too much customization and maintenance just to perform the same basic tasks. We must develop software and methods to automate development and facilitate re-use, or risk constraining the growth of this market.
Optimizing all assets - tangible and intangible: New software technologies and applications need to help organizations address the key challenge of optimizing the liabilities to their physical assets and liabilities (like electric grids or hospitals) and then
It’s The Application Dummy...
Given the immature state of Smart Systems, most people have trouble understanding the important role applications will play. Today, applications are cumbersome and complex to develop. Whether the application is developed by the company deploying it or a third party, they are often custom developed which entails a very high level of engineering complexity due to disparate data formats, diverse networks, different operating systems, and so on. Applications are what’s really required to drive growth and inform smart connected systems value.
It is easy to think of the ThingWorx platform as being yet another connectivity platform. But it’s really an application development platform - not just functionality for provisioning and managing de-vice communications. As hard as it may seem to imagine, there really are no existing application development platforms available today specifically designed for connected systems.
A careful examination of marketplace offerings clearly demon-strates that today’s M2M software platforms have not kept pace with evolving technologies, particularly application development tools for connecting devices, people, systems and businesses.
-nologies that will integrate diverse asset information in unprecedented ways to solve more complex business problems.
Flexible, scaleable systems: IT professionals rarely talk these days about the need for ever-evolving information services that can be made available anywhere, anytime, for any kind of information. Instead, they talk about web services, enterprise apps and now cloud computing. The Web stores information in one of two basic ways: utterly unstructured, or far too rigidly structured. The unstructured way gives us typical static Web pages, blog postings, etc., in which the basic unit of information is large, free-form, and lacking any fundamental identity. The overly structured way involves the use of relational database tables that impose rigid,
pre-ordained schemas on stored information. These schemas, designed by database administrators in advance, are not at all agile or easily extensible. Making even trivial changes to these schemas is a cumbersome, expensive process that
context of the data they store. Both of these approaches to data-structure enforce severe limitations on the functions you want most in a global, pervasive-era information system: scalability, interoperability and seamless integration of real-time or event-driven data. The client-server model underlying the Web greatly compounds the problem.
Some things that look easy turn out to be hard. That’s part of the strange saga of the that should be kept simple are allowed to get unnecessarily complex, and that’s the other part of the story. The drive to develop technology can inspire grandiose visions that make simple thinking seem somehow embarrassing or not worthwhile. That’s not a is where the new values of ThingWorx platform really come into focus.
Model-Based Development Reduces Complexity and Time
The fact that a rapidly expanding range of devices have the capability to automatically transmit information about status, performance and usage and can interact with people and other devices anywhere in real time points to the increasing complexity of applica-tions. This only compounds when we consider the billions or more of networked devices that many observers are forecasting will be deployed. Some basic design principles must be put in place to guide the development of smart connected applications.
We are reaching a
critical juncture on
the path to “smarter”
systems where
organizations will
be crying out for
a completely new
approach
The tools we are working with today to make products “smart” on networks were not designed to handle the scope of new capabilities, the diversity of devices and the mas-sive volume of data-points generated from device interactions.
These challenges are
the rate existing tools and is expected to increase 5x in 10 years. This makes increasing the pace at which applications can be developed and deployed a critical requirement.
What is needed is a common means of connected application development that can leverage tools across families of interrelated devices and diverse domains. What would this entail:
Software and development tools to address a broad range of application requirements - increasingly, customers will need a single unified framework to design and build solutions that can interoperate across diverse data environments and under widely differing usage scenarios;
Software and tools that allow users to quickly build their own functions, capabilities and applications making people, devices and systems accessible as well as easily integrated with business and operations applications. Users need to be able to quickly integrate smart devices with new applications for analytics, usage and on-line collaboration that are reliable, secure and scalable.
Software and tools that leverage re-use - given the scale of the Internet of Things it will simply not be humanly possible to write all the code required without large scale re-use and collaborative “self-service” participation.
We are reaching a critical juncture in market development where organizations will soon be crying out for a completely new approach - one where the effort invested to develop new applications can be quickly and easily utilized again and again across an ever broader spectrum of devices, integration and interaction schemes.
Customers expect evolving software tools to be functional, ubiquitous, and easy-to-In order to achieve all three, a new approach is required -- but what kind of approach? The bit, the byte, and later the packet made possible the entire enterprise of digital computing and global networking. Until the world agreed upon these basic concepts, it
-physical and information space, and among any conceivable information devices. ThingWorx’ unique model-driven and iterative development environment allows users to create data representations - “Things” - of a physical device, person or system. The essence of an “Thing” is completely abstracted from its real-world embodiment and is mutually interchangeable. Examples of “things” includes:
Properties: static and dynamic “state” data/information that are a Thing’s real-time projection to the world;
Services: Things can implement and invoke services; Events: Things can generate and subscribe to events;
Streams: Things can store simple or complex activity streams; Contained Things: Things can contain other Things; and, Mashups: Things can have mashups bound to them.
This model-driven development approach dramatically reduces solution development time, increases quality and fosters reusability. This model-based approach when
Figure 2: Connected Platform Drives New User and Customer Values
Open Interoperable Data In Multiple Parallel Formats (Structured, Unstructured, Time-based)
Collects, Tags, And Relates Different Data Types Creating An Operational Data Store That Becomes More Valuable As The Quantity Of Data And The Density Of Relationships Grows
Operates With “Search-Based “ Information Discovery - Users Can Find Information And Discover Patterns Without IT “Specialists” or Complex Data Normalization Mashups Enables Business Users To Quickly Assemble New Ad Hoc Application Solutions
Functionality For Collaborative User Participation For Sharing Data and Building Applications
Instant Messaging-based Connectivity Enables Real-time Interaction Between Devices, People, And Systems Existing Systems
(M2M & Similar) Existing Systems Are Organized In “Hub & Spoke” Manner Which Create “Data Silos” and Prevents Systems From Acting In An Interoperable Manner
Application Development Is Custom and Very Complex - Few If Any Tools For Users To Quickly Develop Applications
Software Platforms Typically Focus On Single Data Types Limiting Range of Execution Processes
Intelligence Tools Work Off Of "Curated" Data Sets Limiting The Questions That Can Be Answered To Those Known In Advance Scalability Limited – Lack of Peer-To-Peer Schema For Data Relationships and Data Fusion
Connected Collaborative Platforms
bined with self-service tools that allow users to search for information and mashup simple workspaces results in a 5X increase in solution development velocity.
Data Equality Drives User Innovation and Collective Intelligence
In today’s world, information is not free (and that’s free as in “freedom,” not free as in “free of charge”). In fact, thanks to present information architectures, it’s not free to easily merge with other information and enable any kind of search-based intelligence.
What would truly liberated information be like? It might help to think of the atoms and molecules of the physical world. They have distinct identities, of course, but they are also matter. Often this bonding requires special circumstances, such as extreme heat or pres-sure, but not always.
In the world of information, such bonding is not all that easy. Today’s software platforms focus on execution processes that generate one of three types of data - unstructured, tools have evolved to provide “insight” but, in most cases, these tools limit the questions that can be answered to those known in advance. So for a user attempting to do some-thing as simple as asking a certain multi-dimensional question, creating new information from multiple data types that is an easily perceivable, manipulable, or mappable “model” The ThingWorx platform fundamentally changes this para-digm, treating data from things, people, systems and the physical world as augmented representations. In other words, treating diverse data types equally. This enables processes connecting diverse data in any combination to be rapidly built and deployed.
The traditional approaches to data discovery and systems intelligence have two failings: they can’t provide a holistic view of these diverse data types and, the types of intelli-gence tools available to users are, at best, arcane and typi-cally limited in use to “specialists.”
ThingWorx brings “search-based intelligence” to the world of connected things. Their platform includes a tool called SQUEAL™ which is a search, query and analysis tool that acts on unstructured, transactional and time-based data simultaneously. Users can specialists or IT support. This allows users to determine where deeper analytics or the creation of an ad hoc business process can add value.
Facilitating search-based
discovery, enabled by
data and information
accessibility and cumulative
systems intelligence, is a
fundamental requirement for
next generation platforms
Given the immature state of today’s real-world systems, most people have trouble grasp-ing the power and importance these capabilities enable. The ability to detect patterns in data is the holy grail of smart systems and The Internet of Things because it allows not only patterns but a whole higher order of intelligence to emerge from large collections of ordinary data. The implications are obviously immense.
identity while bonding freely with other data. Facilitating discovery, based on data and information accessibility and cumulative systems intelligence, is one of the fundamental purposes of ThingWorx’ platform. They are designing a system for a genuinely connected
Collaborative Futures
At the end of the day, the convergence of collaborative systems and machine to machine communications implies a total paradigm-shift in IT. The depth of this shift has begun to suggest itself, but it is by no means accomplished. It’s a shift from knowing “what hap-pened” to knowing “what is happening”—all the time—and then automatically controlling systems and assets with that knowledge.
For businesses to really succeed at community building, they will need to fully embrace -sign not only devices and networks but also information interactions in ways not ad-dressed by classical enterprise applications and systems today. To address this chal-lenge, ThingWorx includes integral collaboration elements, including discussion forums, blogs and wikis, to capture and codify “tribal” knowledge.
The intersection of Enterprise 2.0 and the Internet of Things creates value at two disparate ends of the business spectrum. The adoption of Web 2.0 social networking and collab-orative software for businesses is creating new value for businesses, driven from social collaboration between employees, partners, customers and suppliers. On the other end, the rise of the “Internet of Things” has helped transform manufacturing companies into value-added service companies. Manufacturers are learning that by putting products on networks they are essentially placing themselves into continuous contact with their customers, thereby enabling them to better understand their customer’s needs and act appropriately. The intersection of these two emerging trends creates an opportunity for business users/developers and OEMs to evolve their business model and drive com-common enterprise social networking platform with the ability to support remote devices, machines, and people as peer members of the community.
The Internet and new collaboration technologies are allowing companies and their cus-tomers to interact with unprecedented levels of richness. This collaboration can come in many forms, from an end user and call center operator working together to solve a problem with a piece of equipment, to a service engineer devising optimized methods to streamline repetitive tasks, or a customer working with a service or product design often lead to new innovative solutions that create long-term value for the OEM, the user and all the value adders involved in its use. Relational capital, that which grows from cus-Examples of next generation interaction between intelligent devices and humans are plentiful. But to fully understand the true power of collaborative technology in the context of smart systems, applications must be realized on a large scale. The next chapter of this story will require a sophisticat-ed platform that allows sophisticat-edge devices—be they business, or consumer, human or machine, operated wirelessly or wired, host-based or cloud enabled—to participate in coordinated knowledge sharing, problem solving, and transactions that span dynamically created communities.
This will take personalization to another level, turning “things” into learning machines that can be trained to know a users’ habits and behaviors. Based on a human’s needs (e.g. a infer needs and deliver highly individualized content without requiring a user to search, or in many cases to think about.
While these new tools are inherently disruptive and sometimes challenge an organization and its culture, they are not technically complex to implement. Rather, they are a relatively lightweight overlay to the existing infrastructure and do not necessarily require complex technology integration. An example device integration package for such a community includes the ability to “chat” with the device to request status and execute commands, send updates to a feed, and the ability to establish a direct peer-to-peer (P2P) connection to a device for remote desktop or more specialized diagnostics.
ThingWorx platform innovation recognizes that valuable data can be stored in many loca-data types from many sources as well as the ability to provide loca-data feeds to other existing enterprise applications, knowledge bases, and customer portals.
Finally, one other very important aspect of collaborative systems are their openness, which allows anyone to create applications that can be subscribed to and used by other members of the community. These applications may be horizontally focused, such as a
The convergence of
device applications and
collaboration creates an
opportunity for users and
customers to interact
with unprecedented
levels of richness
markets. The fact that these systems can be completely open provides third party In-dependent Software Vendors (ISVs) with access to a customer base that they otherwise may not have been able to viably approach and eliminates the burden on them having to deal with gaining access to critical device information. Open platform-based develop-ment has proven itself as powerful mode of innovation and developdevelop-ment.
Getting There First...But To Where
Though their business models are intermingling today, all of the major categories of sup-pliers in the “traditional” so-called M2M software arena have historically operated within well-established assumptions about product scope and business models. No one would characterize the existing players of being technology or business model innovators or disruptive in nature.
Radical new thinking about information technology must begin at the most basic levels, with new conceptions about the interac-tions of information with people, systems and devices. ThingWorx’
-sible assumptions about the nature of networked objects and the data they produce, carry or process - the company takes a much broader, all-encompassing view of information. Ultimately, this type of platform solution will alter traditional business models and how new applications are realized.
-ings and business practices, and is driven by a very unique set of needs, it stands to reason that this type of solution does not fall within the narrow specialties of the existing players. In fact, the platform being described is probably best viewed as an entirely new market category. This is particularly true given the disjointed patchwork of device solu-tions presently in place and the apparent lack of vision from existing players of what’s required in the future. The opportunity to lead in developing and shaping this market tomorrow’s challenges as well as today’s.
No one would
characterize the
existing market players
as business model
innovators or disruptors
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