Pardon my absence while doing the annual IRS dance.
While I was preoccupied, GE and IBM put the last nail in the coffin of those who are waiting to launch IoT initiatives and revise their strategy until the Internet of Things is more ….. (supply your favorite dismissive wishy-washy adjective here).
It’s official: the IoT is here, substantive, and profitable.
Deal with it.
To wit:
- GE announced that it will complete the divestiture of non-industrial divisions that began with selling its appliance division to Electrolux, getting rid of $30 billion in real estate holdings as part of selling off its up-and-down finance wing. After the divestiture, it will focus on the “Industrial Internet,” its flavor of IoT, focused on manufacturing, which is suddenly sexy again.
- IBM announced it will spend $3 billion on an IoT division, as part of its continuing shift from hardware to emerging fields such as analytics, the cloud, and mobile computing.
The two blue-chips’ moves were decisive and unambiguous. If you aren’t following suit, you’re in trouble.
The companies accompanied these bold strategic moves with targeted ones that illustrate how they plan to transform their companies and services based on the IoT and related technologies such as 3-D printing and Big Data:
- GE, which has become a leader in 3-D printing, announced its first FAA-approved 3-D jet engine part, housing a jet’s compressor inlet temperature sensor. Sensors and 3-D printing: a killer combination.
- IBM, commercializing its gee-whiz Watson big data processing system, launched Watson Health in conjunction with Apple and Johnson & Johnson, calling it “our moonshot” in health care, hoping to transform the industry. Chair Ginny Rometty said that:
“The Watson Health Cloud platform will ‘enable secure access to individualized insights and a more complete picture of the many factors that can affect people’s health,’ IBM says each person generates one million gigabytes of health-related data across his or her lifetime, the equivalent of more than 300 million books.”
There can no longer be any doubt that the Internet of Things is a here-and-now reality. What is your company doing to catch up to the leaders and share in the benefits?
