The business opportunities in the “Internet of things” will be seized by companies that ask better questions and invest in smart people who understand the answers.
These and other conclusions wrapped up a day-long event Tuesday sponsored by the Illinois Technology Association aimed at helping participants make sense of the emerging new world of sensor-embedded, data-generating objects all around us.
Panelists agreed that the opportunities are in finding useful information among massive piles of raw data increasingly churned out by our digital world.
Brandon Jung, Google’s Cloud Partner lead, said it surprises him how often companies are unwilling to invest in their own data.
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“Are you willing to set someone aside to look at and understand your data well enough?” he asked. “And, are you going to trust that making that investment in one or two people to look at it will give that return? I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of companies that aren’t quite ready to do that. I think the ones that do are going to be the winners.”
Don DeLoach, CEO of Infobright, which develops high-tech analytical platforms, said “the challenge will be to put the toolsets in the hands of the data scientists.”
“I could look at medical data all day long, and I could be looking at the cure for cancer,” he said. “But I know so little about that that it wouldn’t occur to me. But you take somebody who is the head of neurosurgery at Northwestern, it might be a different day altogether.”
Wayne Boulais, general partner at Apex Venture Partners, said data interpretation and use present business opportunities for consultants.
“There is an enormous opportunity for people who want to specialize in certain business problems, because there are lots of data sets out there that the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) have that they don’t know what to do with,” he said. “They’re collecting it. They have it. But they don’t know what to do with it.”
Another area of opportunity is health care. Liam Quinn, executive director of Dell’s End User Computing CTO Group, said he would love to see tiny diagnostic sensors in a medical cocktail.
“Personally I think health is a big area,” he said. “I would love to be able to drink something and have it do an analysis of the ‘inside’ of me.”
Boulais said he thinks there is big growth potential in linking nondigital worlds — for example, agriculture and human bodies — to the Internet. Whether it is diagnostic sensors in the body, like Quinn mentioned, or sensors in the ground that monitor soil needs, “you’re taking an analog problem, and you are bringing it to the internet.”