TORONTO – Many Canadian businesses still aren’t sure how to leverage the Internet of Things despite the technology's advantages, says a Rogers Communications official.
Eric Simmons, the company’s general manager of IoT and wireless made the comment during an interview Wednesday at this year's annual Canadian Wireless Trade Show in Toronto, where he spoke about IoT and how new end-to-end solutions announced recently by the carrier will help make it "available to the masses."
The three are:
- Farm and Food Monitoring, which allows farmers to remotely check key status of produce, livestock, and equipment by automating processes;
- Cold and Cargo Fleet Management, for monitoring the temperature in trucks shipping sensitive cargo in addition to standard GPS fleet management;
- Food Safety for groceries, warehouses and restaurants, which provide remote monitoring of refrigerators, freezers, fryers to prevent food spoilage and improve safety.
These solutions start at $85-a-month. "We're looking to continue to bring multiple solutions in that space (food) and we're looking to bring others out where it makes sense," Simmons said.
All of the big three wireless carriers and regional telcos like Manitoba Telecom Services (MTS) and SaskTel have Internet of Things or machine-to-machine strategies to leverage their networks. Simmons said Rogers has 1.5 million IoT/M2M connected devices right now.
IoT envisages communications sensors in everything from cars to refrigerators, pipelines to aircraft engines, grabbing and using data to improve business decisions. Simmons said the benefits can include increased revenue, cost reduction and improved customer experiences.
There's a lot of hype around the Internet of Things, Simmons told the conference, but he maintains Rogers' belief in IoT isn't smoke and mirrors.
“(IoT) will have a more transformative impact on business and society than smart phones, the Internet and apps have to date.” – Eric Simmons, Rogers
"The reality is IoT is the next set of technologies businesses are going to use in order to drive growth and differentiation… It will have a more transformative impact on business and society than smart phones, the Internet and apps have to date.”
Yet despite the hype, and three years of evangelizing by Simmons and others, he admitted Canadian businesses lag behind the U.S. and Europe in adopting IoT. "Within the last three-and-a-half years every presentation I started off I had to explain what M2M and IoT was before I got into a discussion around what it is we're doing. Now for the most part people understand to a degree what it is."
But organizations can be overwhelmed by trying to decide which technology to chose, how to install it, how to manage it and how to secure it.
End to end solutions like the three recently announced will help, he said. "I think the way we launched the solutions make it really easy for customers to begin to adopt IoT, for salespeople to go out and talk to their customers, make it quick for a company to do a rapid ROI calculation to determine if the cost solution will bring value to their business. So I think we're going to see a lot further adoption of these types of solutions. because they're easy, repeatable and little risk to their companies."
Organizations should beware of solutions that can’t talk to each other and require multiple providers, he added. Solutions don't necessarily have to use wireless, he explained, but they should leverage cloud storage for data and encryption for security.
He advises companies to first find a key pain point or problem that might be solved with IoT, building a business case with a rapid ROI.
