As the trend of Internet of Things (IoT) is exploding and the market is rapidly evolving, Intel has been aggressive driving this industry transformation and working with partners to grasp huge business opportunities. At the "Intel IoT Asia" Conference held in Taipei recently, Intel teamed up with leading partners, including Chunghwa Telecom, Tatung, and Advantech, to unveil the latest development trends and solutions for IoT.
The whole day event, which was packed with rich contents of keynote speech, panel discussion, and Mega session for various vertical applications, has successfully attracted full house of audience.
Steen Graham, Director of Embedded Sales Group at Intel Asia Pacific Japan, said at the opening remark, "It is forecasted that there will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020 all over the world. All these devices can provide huge amount of data, which will drive brand new value and opportunities for enterprises through the collecting and analyzing of big data. Intel is excited about the arrival of IoT era, and at the Intel IoT Asia event, Intel and our sponsors will showcase our solutions and how we are bringing together our technologies to make IoT a reality."
Imperatives to Realize IoT Vision
Rick Dwyer, VP & GM of Worldwide Embedded Sales Group at Intel, elaborated Intel's IoT vision and the latest technology trend at the keynote speech. "We have been talking about IoT for a while. As the technology gets ready and the ecosystem is built, it's the time for the market to take off. We can foresee that there will be many exciting advancements to come in the near future."
"Taiwan is the powerhouse of IT technology in the world, and will be an important player in driving the IoT market. The continuous technology innovation has accelerated the industry transformation", Dwyer indicated. "According to a recent study, 40% of Fortune Top 500 companies in year 2000 are no longer in the market today. Also, the average lifecycle of companies listed in S&P 500 has been shortened from 67 years to only 15. These facts show that the industry in evolving at an unprecedented speed. Facing the new era of IoT, companies should take bold actions to embrace for the market opportunity."
Leading by the consumer mobile devices, such as smart phone, smart watch, and wearables, IoT application has been rapidly expanded to B2B market. According to Dwyer, the top three imperatives to realize IoT vision are: vertical innovation, think end-to-end solutions, and partner for success. "We can solve real problems and enhance business efficiency for customers by applying intelligence and analytic from big data, and then further change people's lifestyle and living quality."
He stressed that, in order to monetize IoT technology, companies should take open architecture, connectivity, security, management, and analytics into account when developing end-to-end solutions. As for industry collaboration, it involves the establishment of the whole value chain rather than just board and PC. So, it's a complicated task.
In addition to setting up IoT Solutions Alliance, Intel has also worked with leading companies to form Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) and Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) to speed up the deployment of IoT.
Strong Supports from Partners
During the keynote speech, Dwyer invited guest speakers from Chunghwa Telecom, Tatung, and Advantech to introduce their latest IoT services and solutions. And Intel engineers also demonstrated the real applications of IoT for building management and oil pipeline monitoring.
Dr. Lir-Fang Sun, Vice President of Data Communications Business Group at Chunghwa Telecom, introduced how Chunghwa Telecom is teaming up with Intel to drive technology innovations for IoT, cloud computing, and software-defined network (SDN). The two companies will focus on developing smart home, smart energy, and smart transportation services. Wen-yen K. Lin, Chairperson of Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) & President of Tatung, and Chaney Ho, President of Advantech, introduced the energy management system and IoT gateway that they co-developed with Intel.
"With these real collaboration and use cases, we can see that IoT has become a reality", said Rick Dwyer. "Facing this newindustry shift, Intel will no longer play the role of a chip vendor, but a total solution provider for software and services, and we are making efforts in building up an extensive ecosystem." He also asked companies to think big and to drive the technology advancement for the whole value chain, hoping to work with partners to grasp the unprecedented opportunities.
Discussions on the Latest Market Trends
In order to better explain the impacts and benefits that IoT will bring to the industry, a panel discussion session, which was moderated by Philip Cronin, Director of Regional Sales Organization at Intel Asia Pacific, was arranged and several guest speakers were invited to share their view with the audiences. These speakers included Chaney Ho, President of Advantech, Wen-yen K. Lin, Chairperson of Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) & President of Tatung, Kuen-Rong Lo, Director, Internet of Things Laboratory, Telecommunication Laboratories, Chunghwa Telecom, Dr. KC Chen, Distinguished Professor and Associate Dean of College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National Taiwan University, Neil Hickey, Managing Director, Digital and the Mobility Practice Lead in Greater China, Accenture, and Jeffery Paul, VP of Software and Service Sales Organization, Sales and Marketing Group, Intel.
Perfect Chance for Taiwan's Industry Transformation
"It's time for the IoT market to take off. IoT applications will soon become reality, reshaping the industry landscape and people's lives", Philip Cronin said. "However, as interest and excitement for the IoT continues to grow, developers face significant challenges in security, interoperability, and deployment complexity."
"It's exciting to see the emergence of IoT market, with opportunities everywhere in the future", Chaney Ho of Advantech echoed. "With strong foundations in PC industry, it is crucial for Taiwan, as we are in an urgent need to drive industry transformation. IoT offers the best opportunity for us to grasp post-PC era market. Furthermore, IoT involves various aspects from chipsets, middleware, application, to services, and its applications are across different vertical markets. Every company should be able to find a position in the market."
Wen-yen K. Lin of Tatung also pointed out, "As technology gets ready, we are now at the important stage of IoT development. It's just like the dawn of IoT."
As for Tatung's IoT market strategy, the company will first focus on smart energy area. Its subsidiary, Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), has newly developed an intelligent gateway by integrating Intel Quark SoC and I/O board to provide a smart connection between energy management system and other commercial building devices.
According to Wen-yen K. Lin, as energy has become a desperate issue all over the world, this new solution will help achieve significant energy and cost saving. More importantly, the concept of smart building can further be applied to other vertical markets, such as home, factory, and school, to enable smart community, smart city, and eventually the smart country.
"As a leading network operator in Taiwan, Chunghwa Telecom is keen to incorporate IT technology to create innovative services for customers", Lo said. "Our plan is to build an IoT platform to further integrate different technologies in the future."
Driving Innovations
From the viewpoint of academic research, Dr. KC Chen of National Taiwan University said, "While the paradigm shift accelerated, the way that hi-tech industry achieve success 20 years ago is no longer the same. The goal of driving IoT is to bring hi-tech to the society and public, therefore, innovation and research will play an important role."
Facing the future challenges, Chen believed that new ways for education, research, and industrial cooperation are required to generate new impacts. In particular universities, being the cradle of talent cultivation, should reinforce their connections with the industry to get bigger benefits.
From a leading consulting company, Neil Hickey of Accenture indicated that IoT is extremely hot in the market recently. "The impact that IoT brings to enterprises not only in the improvement of business efficiency, but also the new business models, and even the new game rules and competitors", he said.
He pointed out that, facing the strong dynamics and great potentials of IoT market, companies should take bold actions to win the market. Anyone missing this new wave of paradigm shift will lag far behind the competition in the future.
Meanwhile, because of the reshape of value chain and the emergence of new types of services and business models, companies should expect that sales channel in the future will also change. When deploying IoT market, companies should seriously consider if they have the right people and right skill sets to keep up with the demands of IoT market.
"IoT is about the interconnections among data, device, and cloud, and software plays an important key", Jeffery Paul of Intel said. "With products covering embedded platform, security software, API and tools, Intel has kept strengthening our software portfolios in recent years to build up comprehensive solutions to meet customers' requirements."
Comprehensive Vertical Solutions
At IoT Mega Sessions, Intel introduced its extensive solutions for various vertical applications, including retail, smart manufacturing, smart home smart city, big data, software and service.
Retail Application
"When consumers are seeking for individualized experiences, they also need to make sure that their personal information is safe", Ryan Lester, Director of Retail Market Development at Intel, said. "On the other hand, retailers also need to know their customers better, so they can tailor more effective, unified, and protected customer interactions across channels and touch points."
Lester introduced the advanced features of Intel's platforms, which can help retailers to provide personalized, trusted experiences, and allow retailers and brands to add more flexibility to optimize their solutions for various market needs.
Smart Manufacturing
Bob Ferrar, Senior Director of Segment Development and Architecture at Intel said, "In the next 15 years, the world consumption will double creating increased demand of goods. Therefore, higher output and lower cost manufacturing based on smart manufacturing IoT/Industry 4.0 techniques will the norm in the 21st century. And the realization of this goal relies on the integration of information technologies and automation technologies."
Bob Ferrar explained Intel's IoT technologies in manufacturing, the steps to enable smart manufacturing and the equipment enabling blue print based on open standards. He emphasized that Smart Industrial extends beyond automating control equipment, but also automating deployment of data ingestion to deliver business intelligence in many verticals such as Smart Grid. He used the implementation at Intel as an example to explain the practical case of smart manufacturing.
Smart City
Gregg Berkeley, Intel's Global Business Development Director of IoT, said, "By the year 2025, 37 cities worldwide will have a population of greater than 10 million people. Cities already consume 2/3 of the world's energy and the majority of other resources." Therefore, it is crucial to build smart cities with better efficiency and energy saving performance. The top smart city opportunities include transportation, building automation and city sensing, such s pollution monitoring, traffic, and people flow.
"Smarter buildings are integration of information, security, communications, and energy technologies, and can further create new business models and services", he said. He took the "Automation Demanded-Response" solution of Daikin Applied as an example to explain Intel's technology portfolios for smart city, and called upon companies to work with Intel to make joint efforts to realize the vision of smart city.
Larry Cheng, Global Sales Director of Embedded Sales Group at Intel, also pointed out, "Transportation contributes 5-10% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of most countries and plays a key role in inclusive growth, and sustainable development. In 2020, Intelligent Transportation Systems is forecasted to exceed well over USD 30 Billion in global revenue. From the rapid growth of cloud-based fleet management systems to the adoption of clean and connected public transportation systems, the transportation industry is a broad and diverse ecosystem that offers significant opportunity for open standards-based platforms. We are in the midst of a significant transformation of this industry as consumers, companies, and governments demand greater compute and connectivity solutions."
Smart Home
David Paterson, Global Sales Director of Home Gateways at Intel, said, "Smart home covers various areas including security, automation, entertainment, healthcare, and energy management. There are different challenges for consumers and service providers. For the former, there are complicated point solutions and expensive hardware and services, and for the latter, there are the lengthy installation time, difficult integration, and lack of solution innovations."
By adopting open platform, low-cost hardware, and building strong developer ecosystem, Intel aims to address these pain points for both consumers and service providers.
He introduced Intel Puma 6, an Atom-based service gateway solution, with security and networking functions inside. In addition, its application processor is embedded with Intel's CPU, the Intel Virtualization Technology, VT-x. By bringing VT-x datacenter/servers technology to home routers, better hardware protection can be ensured.
Big Data and IoT
Kenny Sng, APJ Solution Architect Manager of Intel, said, "IoT and Big Data is driving business transformation across industries. Intel can provide complete Big Data building blocks from device, gateway, network, to datacenter, in order to meet the application demands for analysis, management, connection, and security. Therefore, we can help customers leverage and monetize their infrastructure, assets and capabilities." Intel's partners, SAP and Cloudera, were also invited to introduce their Big Data solutions.
Software, Service, and Security Solution
Jeffery Paul, Vice President of Software and Services Sales Organization at Intel, said, "SMAC, convergence of social, mobile, analytics and cloud, is driving the rate of business and technology changes. It also creates the demand of new IT platforms. Using API has become crucial for companies to re-construct their business models. And Intel's Mashery API products and services can provide customers with significant strategic advantages. Cisco and Wayne Fueling Systems already adopted our API Management and it is proved that the solution can help them getting ahead from the competition."
Troy Smith, Director of Intel IoT Solutions Alliance, said, "Delivering IoT solutions is not without challenges - such as integration, interoperability, and the limitations of legacy systems - and no one company is able to deliver all the necessary ingredients and services for scalable, secure deployments."
Therefore, the establishment of Intel IoT Solutions Alliance is aimed to address these challenges through industry collaboration, in an effort to provide complete solutions for IoT. At present, the alliance has more than 250 members, covering over 2500 solutions from hardware, software, firmware, tool, to system integration, in a bid to speed up the deployment of smart devices, systems, and end-to end analytics applications.
Rick Dwyer, VP & GM of Worldwide Embedded Sales Group at Intel
Steen Graham, Director of Embedded Sales Group at Intel Asia Pacific Japan
