Mr. Natarajan MM, Vice President for South Asia of Arrow’s global components Asia Pacific and Mr. Sanjeev Keskar, managing director for Arrow India shares insights on IoT trends and key drivers.
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Mr.-Natarajan-MM,-Vice-President-for-South-Asia-of-Arrow’s-global-components-Asia-Pacific What are the key drivers of IoT?
According to an IDC report published in April, the Asia/Pacific Internet of Things (IoT) industry will continue its strong growth, with the number of units, or “things”, connected to increase from 3.1 billion to 8.6 billion by 2020. Over this same period, the total Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) market size will increase from USD250 billion to USD583 billion. The top countries for IoT spending are China, South Korea, and India.
Devices, connectivity, and IT services will make up the majority of the IoT market in 2020. Together, they are estimated to account for over two-thirds of the worldwide IoT market in 2020, with devices (modules/sensors) alone representing 31.8% of the total.
The Indian government has already come out with a draft IoT policy that aims at building an entire ecosystem around IoT and to incentivise the players in the ecosystem. According to a recent report by PcW consulting firm, manufacturing, healthcare, insurance, retail, utility and power generation are some of biggest beneficiaries from IoT.
IoT is going to be driven by four key elements: sensors, actuators, connectivity and data management (people ad processes are a given). All data collected from devices that are connected via sensors and gateways will simply be shared through the cloud. Marrying wireless connectivity with security, low power microcontrollers, long battery life, gateways, and different software operating systems combined with big data storage and analytics is not easy. Companies need to work with trusted partners who have a holistic view of IoT, skilled engineers, and wide portfolio of custom or modular solutions from proven technology suppliers to help them cut through the fog of protocols, hardware, system development, delivering platforms and sub-systems that are IoT-ready.
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What are some of the challenges technology companies in India facing?
Large enterprises and companies have their own R&D investment and engineering team and resources to support them to pursue their own IoT opportunities. However for a technology ecosystem to thrive, it is important to nurture and enable a community of technology SMEs to flourish and prosper. With the enormous number of connected IoT nodes, technology manufacturers are faced with ever-increasing complexity and challenges around wireless connectivity, system integration, data management and aggregation, and monetization opportunities.
These SMEs may specialize in a number of domains including, IP research and design, manufacturing and production, software development…etc While they excel in their own areas, they may lack expertise in wireless connectivity, sensing, system integration, data management and aggregation.
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How can global technology companies such as Arrow can help India companies to accelerate IoT development?
To enable these SMEs to quickly go to market, they will benefit from working with global eco-system enablers/aggregators such as Arrow:
–Shorten IoT-based design development time
–Save development cost and minimize risk via access to proven IoT technology expertise and engineering resources
–Tap into Arrow’s established network with leading global technology suppliers
–Access to potential new business partners/customers
To help customers better capture unprecedented market opportunities, we have developed 50+ machine-to-machine(M2M) and IoT reference solutions for applications ranging from wearables, automotive, lighting, industrial automation, smart energy to power. We have a solid understanding of the Third-Platform Technologies eco-system and have established collaboration with not just IDH partners but also service/system integrators to enable business models to support software and apps development, We are working with some of the most innovative global suppliers such as TI, Qualcomm, ST, NXP, On Semiconductor, Cypress, ThunderSoft….etc.
The application varieties in IoT area are tremendous and new comers to the ecosystem may not have enough solution expertise to build a complete application. This is where Arrow comes in. We provide our customers with a comprehensive approach and connected solution framework to help them develop a new generation of connected intelligent devices.
