<div><p><strong><em>IoT has not raised big money in India, but a clear business model is clearly visible with large enterprises finally piloting the technology, writes Vishal Krishna</em></strong></p></div><div>The phrase internet-of-things is like a science fiction movie which makes fantasies out of an engineer's home project. But when these home projects become technologies that enable an organisation to collect data from machines across the world, on a real time basis, and then use this data to make decisions, this becomes a powerful and intelligent network. It is what the likes of Cisco and IBM are betting on. So are several Indian engineering startups which will be complimented by several analytics companies in crunching data. The human network will be connecting with several devices, and sensors will be interacting with each other, which organisations want to tap to build future factories. </div><div><br>It is perhaps the first time that factories will work in tandem with their sales organisations. These experiments are happening across India at this very moment. Gartner Inc forecasts that 4.9 billion connected things will be in use in 2015, up 30 per cent from 2014, and will reach 25 billion by 2020 globally. This sudden expansion will boost the economic impact of the IoT as consumers, businesses, city authorities, hospitals and many other entities find new ways in which to exploit the technology. Gartner estimates that IoT will support total services spending of $69.5 billion in 2015 and $263 billion by 2020. Indian IoT startups are yet to raise big money, not more than $20 million has been raised so far. But in 12 months the number may actually double. </div><div> </div><div>Walk in to the office of WebNMS, a division of US based Zoho Corp, in Chennai and one notices its employees in deep programming. They are building a platform that allows enterprises to pull data from devices, robots and programmable logic controllers (PLC) machines on a shop floor, which is quickly channelled in to relevant and actionable dashboards. Currently WebNMS are working with a large telecom company, on a pilot basis, to bring in transparency in to the Cell Tower maintenance business. The transparency tracking can be done with a click of a button on your smart phone network.</div><div> </div><div>Companies like Airtel and Vodafone spend enormous amounts of money on diesel. There are 600,000 towers in India that consume 5.8 billion litres of fuel per year according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and to make matters worse 10 per cent is the value loss through leakages. Analysts add that the industry is plagued by fake bills that are being generated in the system. WebNMS has now installed a small 6-inch by 6-inch box inside the Cell Tower to track diesel consumption. The data of consumption gets visualised on to a tablet and the telecom operator's operations head can control maintenance costs effectively.<br><br>"Today software and the network can track anything if collated intelligently," says Prabhu Ramachandran, Director of WebNMS. He adds that the client is not bothered about IoT jargon and wants to know how the platform can increase his company's revenues."This is no longer a sales conversation, it is about how the value they gain," says Ramachandran. The IoT platform is in its sixth generation, for WebNMS, and it has been working on the product since 2009. It hopes that this IoT product will be adopted by automobile OEMs, manufacturing companies, hospitals, real estate and retail companies. WebNMS is also working on IoT projects with a facilities management company, for predictive maintenance of diesel gensets, and are also helping a windmill company on predicting the rate of failure of engines that power the windmill. </div><div> </div><div>"The digital shift is instigated by the nexus of forces, which are the cloud, mobile, social, boosted by IoT and threaten many existing businesses. They have no choice but to pursue IoT, like they have done with the consumerization of IT," said Jim Tully, vice president at Gartner.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Blooming Internet of Everything</strong></div><div>While we see ideas that bring transparency in the system, in Chennai, then let us jump to Pune where two companies are trying to make IoT cool for manufacturers. Covacsis which raised $450000 from angel investors, and later raised a large undisclosed round from Cisco, is implementing technology that creates a network of machines.<br><br>"Our software collects operating information from machines and uses the internet to sendimmediate reports to companies," says Tarun Mishra, CEO of Covacsis. This low cost product can help the 4 million high value small and medium enterprises, in India, that use machines on a daily basis. Similarly CarIQ has built a small dongle which connects to the on-board diagnostics of a car. The software pulls all the information about the functioning of the car and provides dashboards through consumer apps. This startup has raised $500000 from Snow Leopard Ventures and is focused on selling the product to automobile OEMs and consumers. The founder SagarApte believes thatconsumers will retro fit the dongle if the OEM supports this system. By 2020, there will be a quarter billion connected vehicles on the road, enabling new in-vehicle services and automated driving capabilities, according to Gartner Inc. During the next five years, the proportion of new vehicles equipped with this capability will increase dramatically, making connected cars a major element of the IoT.</div><div> </div><div>A similar bet is taken by Savaari Networks in Bangalore. Only this time the startup has taken the route of creating WiFi infrastructure, set up across a city,which will connect cars to government databases. The government can push messages to cars during natural and manmade disasters and also warn drivers to platoon off to exits. "There are several consumer applications that can be launched with government data. The cloud and the network are central to this ecosystem," says Sridhar Reddy, co-founder of Savaari Networks. The company has received a grant of $100000 from the Department of Transportation in the USA. The list does not end there; startups like Altiux, SenseGiz and ShopWorx are working on building tie ups with manufacturing companies and are also focusing on building consumer applications for their IoT architecture.</div><div> </div><div>For the average CTO, of any organisation, he or she is confused over what is really IoT. Today a Hyundai or Toyota plant, in India, would have 40 per cent of the work performed by robots. These robots are generating massive amounts of data through their sensors. Why is this data important? To simplify it, IoT is nothing but the use of sensors to collect information and transport it through the network. But it does not end there. It involves slicing and dicing of this data in the network through IT back end architectures, such asHadoop,with the use of new programming languages like Phython and PHP to distribute data to various departments that can make use of the data. This will eventually benefit the organisation. In the manufacturing case, the supply chain data can be organised with machine data and consumer data for quick insights, which means data from marketing offices in smart devices, point of sale data, logistics data and manufacturing data, of several regions, will flow in to a single platform for analysis. The final slide in to making this a money making machine and this is where our startup friends are yet to create a business model.<br><br>At least the technology is taking flight. The business will follow with enterprises championing this technology.</div>
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