Layanan integrasi IoT berkembang di pasar yang semakin matang

Layanan konsultasi dimulai dengan dasar-dasar IoT

In today’s IoT market, service providers emphasize consulting clients before plunging into the technical issues of integration. This idea is to encourage customers to think more critically about their business needs and how IoT might fit into their plans.

“Our guidance for clients has been, ‘Let’s take a step back and take away some of these mad science experiments you have been working on and take it back to first principles,'” said Juan Orlandini, chief architect for the cloud and data center transformation division at Insight Enterprises, an IT services company based in Tempe, Ariz. “‘What is the business case you are trying to solve?'”

Juan Orlandini

Orlandini advised customers to vigorously pursue an IoT initiative if it will help them make or save money. IoT experiments may still be appropriate, but customers must treat them as such. “Don’t overinvest. Do a proof of concept,” he said.

Michele Pelino, analis utama di Forrester Research, juga menyebutkan perlunya pelanggan dan mitra integrasi mereka untuk memulai dengan hal-hal mendasar.

Michele Pelino

“Starting with the problem is the first thing,” she said. “Solving the problem could be an IoT solution or it could be something else.”

Ultimately, the answer could be an “and” rather than an “or.” A customer may need IoT in addition to other technology offerings the integrator can provide, Pelino said.

Cloud, edge, dan integrasi baru

Komputasi awan merupakan salah satu teknologi teratas yang kini dikaitkan dengan IoT.

Myke Miller, consulting managing director at Deloitte Consulting and dean of the Deloitte Cloud Institute, cited the “natural linkage” between the cloud and the enormous volume of data generated by IoT sensors and devices.

Mike Miller

“The cloud providers recognize IoT as a driving use case for their services,” he said. “I think that has been a motivator for them to add a significant level of sophistication and integration to their own products and services.”

Pergeseran awan, pada gilirannya, telah memicu hal ini komputasi tepi and the idea of “intelligence at the edge,” Miller added. Edge computing offerings such as Pos terdepan AWS dan Microsoft Azure Tumpukan biarkan organisasi memindahkan beban kerja komputasi lebih dekat ke tempat asal data. Hal ini menghindari masalah latensi dan bandwidth saat memindahkan semua data IoT ke situs pusat, sekaligus mendorong pengambilan keputusan ke sekitar sensor IoT itu sendiri, katanya.

Lokasi tersebut dapat mencakup mobil, sumur minyak atau pabrik, kata Orlandini. Di masa lalu, sensor IoT mengirimkan data ke repositori pusat sebelum AI dan pembelajaran mesin dapat memprosesnya untuk mendapatkan wawasan yang dapat ditindaklanjuti.

Miller menunjuk Amazon Lookout for Equipment, yang tersedia pada bulan April, sebagai contoh konvergensi edge-IoT. Penawaran AWS menanamkan kemampuan edge ke dalam peralatan industri untuk pemeliharaan prediktif. Perkembangan seperti itu memudahkan pengguna akhir untuk mengintegrasikan IoT dengan proses bisnis, katanya.

Potensi integrasi IoT dari komputasi awan dan tepi juga mengubah diskusi antara pelanggan dan penyedia layanan.

“It’s a much more strategic conversation,” Pelino said. “Not everything is going to the cloud, and not everything will be processed at the edge.”

There’s a change management piece of an IoT solution that SIs can bring to the table.

This conversation flows from the initial consultative focus on the customer’s business problem. With the key use case in mind, organizations can address the salient questions, Pelino suggested: “What data and insight do I need at the location of the connected assets, and what should be sent back to the cloud for additional processing and advanced analytics?”

IoT siap pakai

Such high-level discussions are a decisive shift from the original crop of IoT integration services. “Back in the beginning, you had to be a really good designer or mechanical engineer,” Orlandini said. A customer could call on an integrator to create a custom enclosure to protect IoT gear from harsh industrial environments, he said.

Today, however, major hardware manufacturers offer boxes equipped with pre-integrated IT, Nvidia graphics cards, built-in 5G — all in an enclosure designed to withstand shocks and temperature extremes.

Sementara itu, penyedia layanan menawarkan pendekatan mereka sendiri mengenai integrasi out-of-the-box. Perusahaan kini menyediakan starter kit IoT. Deloitte, misalnya, menawarkan akselerator IoT siap pakai untuk pemeliharaan prediktif, manajemen kinerja aset, dan kasus penggunaan pelacakan aset.

Akselerator ini mempersingkat waktu yang dibutuhkan untuk membangun dan menerapkan aplikasi IoT, yang sebelumnya membutuhkan waktu berbulan-bulan untuk diluncurkan, kata Miller. Deloitte’s integrated IoT packages, yang menggabungkan penawaran dari mitra vendor seperti AWS, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) dan Predix, memberikan bukti konsep (POC) dalam delapan hingga 12 minggu, menurut perusahaan.

“We can very quickly iterate on IoT-based solutions,” Miller said.

Insight pada tahun 2020 meluncurkan fondasi IoT yang disebutnya Platform Terhubung Wawasan. The company’s accelerator aggregates a multitude of sensors and devices from Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, HPE and Dell Technologies, among other partners.

Forrester’s Pelino said such accelerators and pre-integrated offerings aim to help customers demonstrate IoT’s value sooner rather than later. “They don’t want to put years and years of resources, money and time into an effort,” she said.

While an accelerator can jumpstart an IoT project, the approach “may not address a lot of the comprehensive requirements” customers would like to see roll out in the future, Pelino added. A successful starter project, however, can pave the way for broader deployments.

Mencapai skala

Perjalanan menuju peningkatan skala dan penerapan di seluruh perusahaan memberikan peluang lain untuk layanan integrasi IoT. Integrator sistem berperan ketika organisasi berupaya memperluas POC mereka dan membatasi instalasi IoT.

“Where you start is not where you end up,” Pelino said. “As you extend into new use cases, more business processes connect through the [IoT] solutions.”

Dalam konteks ini, integrator dapat membantu pelanggan meningkatkan penerapan IoT mereka, menawarkan rangkaian teknologi yang dibangun berdasarkan keahlian vertikal dan teknologi mereka ekosistem mitra, she said. An IoT integrator’s advantage lies in providing customers with access to best-in-class technology and offering pre-integrated interfaces that link their various ecosystem partners or to legacy analytics and business system environments.

But technology isn’t the only consideration. An IoT project will often spark organizational change as it extends beyond a POC. A business might need to revamp how it performs particular processes while employees change the way they do their jobs.

“Those issues are more challenging than technical ones,” Pelino said. “There’s a change management piece of an IoT solution that SIs can bring to the table.”

Integrator juga dapat membantu pelanggan mengatasi kesenjangan keahlian, yang, seiring dengan kerasnya perubahan organisasi, dapat menghalangi penerapan yang terukur, katanya.

Service providers seek to guide customers through the POC-to-production process. Insight, for example, uses three internals teams to execute projects. Insight’s Digital Innovation group assists customers with IoT ideation and POCs, Orlandini said. When the customer is ready to scale its initial IoT foothold, Insight’s cloud and data center transformation division determines what type of infrastructure and security the customer will need. Finally, the company’s connected workforce business handles the logistics of procuring, pre-integrating and shipping equipment for a customer’s IoT deployment. Insight’s supply chain optimization group supports the other divisions in providing IoT services.

Namun, ketika penyedia layanan mengejar hal tersebut masa depan IoT, they are sometimes called back to what Orlandini calls “first principles.” And the quirks of connected devices.

For example, when Insight took a restaurant customer’s POC into production, it found the system’s IoT base station wasn’t receiving signals from the temperature sensors installed inside the client’s commercial refrigerators. To remedy this, Insight had to custom design a bracket that mounted sensors inside the refrigerators where they could broadcast with the appropriate signal strength.

Orlandini mengatakan perbaikannya relatif sederhana setelah Insight mencermati dan menerapkan beberapa hal mendasar.

“The first principle is that radio does not travel well through metal objects,” Orlandini said. “You can’t ignore physics when dealing with the real world.”