IoT is not just about tech, but business #Samsung

We caught up with Dr. Aloknath De, Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Samsung R&D Institute India - Bangalore. He spoke on the vast global Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem and what the future holds for all these devices. Excerpts from the video interview...

The proliferation of both devices and data...

A recent Statista report that talked about 21.5 billion connected devices in the world, 60% of them being active devices. Future growth would be high if the systems are proven to be working, if security issues are not a big concern, if the sensors are cost-effective, if we are able to have more and more applications and business value is clearly derived. Based on reports, projections are of 75 billion devices by 2025. They will create about 75 Zettabytes of data cumulatively. (1 Zettabyte is 10 to the power of 21 bytes).

Elephant, horse and rodent class of IoT devices…

Taking consumer electronics’ devices in the home environment, there are “elephant class” devices: Big ones like the TV and the fridge that sit somewhere. The second is the “horse class” that trots along with you: The smartphone, the watch and earbuds. Then there are smaller devices sticking to the doors, windows and curtains. They are small rodent class and keep transmitting information in a significant way for other purposes and are controlled by bigger devices.

The business need for IoT devices...

You could think of this in the enterprise and industrial contexts too. The whole IoT context is about connecting such devices and making certain conditions happen to automate things and get seamlessness, efficiency and performance improvement of the system.

IoT is not just about technology, but it is about business. There has to be a great set of decision building. That’s where you provide to the executives a dashboard by saying whenever people use this, they also use this device. There could be many such observations and deeper insights.

During the pandemic, smart manufacturing has been heavily adopting IoTs. Logistics warehouses, this whole online and omni-channel management, that segment has also done fairly well in terms of adopting the same.

Talking about the Samsung platform…

Today the SmartThings platform has connected closer to 200 million devices. In a home we can have a smart living room, or smart kitchen or the smart home itself. All the devices could talk to each other. Each of these devices are also becoming more and more intelligent.

5G and IoT

In 5G one of the beauties is that it can give very high throughput, it has less latency, so you can have interactive systems and machine communication. 5G and IoT together can make a big impact locally and also in a remote way.

Check out the complete interview...