latoga labs – Internet of Things

Will HomePod be Apple’s Smart Home Hub?

June 6, 2017 1 Comment

It’s always fun to see what new things Apple announced at WWDC. After some thought and discussion time to process Apple’s WWDC 2017 Keynote, rather than focus on the AR demo (which I also think is the seed for some future disruption) I’ve been thinking about IoT and the smart home segment of IoT. One question remains to be answered for me, will the HomePod be Apple’s smart home hub?

Apple is playing catch up in this area and is obviously feeling the pressure if they are announcing a new product 6 months before availability, something that is very anti-Appleesque. Though one could argue that this is natural evolution for their product announcements since they all expand the Apple Ecosystem and you need to have developers connecting to the new device before they ship (especially when Amazon’s Echo has over 10,000 skills already). Every time they do this the hope fades a bit more within the Apple fan base around Apple every surprising us again with a killer new technology innovation, but that’s a whole nother rabbit hole to go down.

So when playing catch up, it’s not surprising that Apple would play to their strengths…music. The HomePod was introduced as a reimagined way to do music within the home (we should all be getting good at seeing thru the marketing rhetoric by now). It’s initial specs look like a great home speaker and integrated with Apple Music gives you more options than time in your life to listen to. And at the end there was an almost passing remark about the HomePod being part of the HomeKit. The HomePod page even mentions “it’s a hub for controlling your smart home accessories”. But, the current specs don’t talk about any local area communications, no Bluetooth, no Z-Wave, no zigbee.

Would Apple jump on the Z-Wave or zigbee bandwagons to quickly expand the Smart Home options and have their HomePod also become one of the core SmartHome bridges? Again, not very Appleesque. But I would expect to at least have seen bluetooth on the HomePod so all those HomeKit devices that use bluetooth and the AppleTV as their hub would have another way to enter the Apple Ecosystem. It just makes sense to use the HomePod’s processing power to also control and bridge the smart home to Siri and the Apple Ecosystem, but that is being seen as a side feature to the speaker. I’m expecting (or hoping) that bluetooth appears in the specs before the HomePod is shipped in 6 months. And it will be interesting to see what home kit integrations we see when the HomePod final ships.

What this shows is how IoT is an enabling technology but not something that most consumers think about buying directly. Consumers especially are spending discretionary budget on things they enjoy…like Music. And the ecosystem power is in pulling the consumer into this larger thing than just music without them realizing it. So again, while Apple may be late to the home speaker market, they have created something that consumers will understand the need for immediately and purchase. Compare that to the immediate thought many of us had when the Amazon Echo appears…”why do I need that anyway?”. I think the HomePod will quickly catching up to Amazon’s Echo in shipments and help push the smarts into the home faster without people realizing it.

IoT World 2017 Thoughts

May 22, 2017 Leave a Comment

Last week I was at IoT World 2017 in Santa Clara and while I only stopped in at the vendor expo for a few days, there were a number of changes within the expo floor from last year that I noticed.

We are still very much in Day 1 of IoT. Things are still ebbing and flowing as the underlying vendors within IoT figure out what they want to be.
I noticed a number new (to me at least) smaller platform vendors, though they are at least focusing their platform, or at least their marketing, on specific vertical areas of IoT.
Pivots are still happening; platform vendors are adding devices and turning into solution providers; some solution providers are ditching their devices to focus on their platforms, and some larger firms are realizing that there is little value for them in trying to be their own platform and instead have OEM’d someone else’s platform (though this is sometimes apparent and sometimes not).
A few vendors are understanding the ecosystem needs around IoT and were presenting themselves as the ecosystem hub, Samsung specifically…
…while other ecosystem driven vendors chose not to represent, Amazon Web Services and GE Predix specifically.
I found it still hard to differentiate between vendors as building block providers, integrated platform providers, or vertical solution providers.
Customers are better educated on what IoT means and seemed to be asking more specific question around use cases and projects.

It seems that there still is a need for a IoT Solution reference architecture which can be used to both connect the business and technical as well as gauge vendors offering against. Which is something that I have been working on for a while in the background and look forward to offering up to the community soon.

20170523 Update: I forgot to mention that one of the most interesting enabling technologies that I came across at IoT World was from Matrix Industries. It’s not really the smartwatch they show on their website but the underlying Thermoelectric Technology. Take heat and turn it into power to charge a battery. In the world of IoT, and I’m thinking specifically IIoT, there is heat generation that already happens due to the operation of the device. Using a thermoelectric generator (TEG), like the one Matrix Industries has inside their smartwatch, you could power your IoT related sensors and possibly the communication channel (assuming they are both low power enough to be powered by a TEG) as a side effect of the waste energy from your device/equipment. I haven’t dug into this much in depth, but it’s an interesting potential concept to help create longevity and increase the scalability of the sensors within your IoT Solution.

The Right IoT Architecture Enables the Journey

May 2, 2017 Leave a Comment

Over the past year and a half, there have been two common themes running through all the IoT related discussions I’ve had with companies big and small. From global corporations crafting a product or operational IoT strategy to small device manufacturers who knew they needed an IoT strategy to compete in the market to startups creating the latest connected service offering, everyone:

struggled to think big enough with their long term IoT strategy *; they usually couldn’t think past the second stage of the IoT Journey.
lacked a general IoT solution architecture as a reference point **; they struggled to understand and compare all the vendors who latched onto the IoT buzzword or called themselves an IoT Platform…

Almost a year ago I presented my vision of the IoT Journey based upon all the customer and partner conversations I had spanning multiple IoT verticals like Automotive, Transportation, Industrial Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Service Sector, and Smart Cities. What I quickly realized was that IoT architecture decisions were being made based on the early stages of the journey and the people building IoT solutions were going to face an expensive re-architecture in the future to fully realize the potential of IoT.

For the past few months I have used my recent down time to document the IoT Solution architecture that I saw as common across all those discussions and used that as my own IoT Solution Reference Architecture to understand the breadth and depth of the various IoT solutions and vendors in the market. After using both the Journey and the Solution Reference Architecture in all my most recent conversations (and being prodded by a few trusted colleagues), I realized I was way overdue in sharing both in more detail.

The generic high level picture most often shown for an IoT Solution looks like this:

Things connecting into the cloud and sending up their data for storage and analytics with users accessing the Solution via either a web or mobile app (or both) to view data send commands down to the thing. When in reality there is much more complexity that is needed and most IoT Solution (should) have an underlying architecture like this:

First, this is a general IoT Solution Architecture, each specific IoT Solution will be more detailed and varied due to business problem specifics, industry regulations, and technical specifics. There is a lot of details, even at an abstracted level like this, and my next few posts will be exploring those details. I have also converted this architecture diagram into a solution functionality map which I have been using to compare different vendor offerings, I’ll be posting more on that in the future as well.

How does this compare to your IoT Solution reference architecture? This project spun out of some IoT consulting work that I have been doing with various clients recently. Please reach out to discuss any IoT projects you may have going on and how I may be able to help you.

* A friend of mine at GE Digital even mentioned that when they do their training courses around IoT for executives, they purposely don’t have them try to think about IoT for their product/offering. It’s hard for anyone who focuses on the current state of their business to quickly jump to think out of that box.

** Even to this day I’m surprised by how many charts of the IoT Marketplace that you find that don’t differentiate between companies using IoT within their offerings versus those providing the IoT building block technologies used to build those prior offerings.