Unlikely Leaders in the IoT Revolution

Through cloud innovation, longstanding businesses and services lead the way in the IoT 4th industrial revolution.

Did you know that elevators are the safest form of travel? Perhaps you did but when I asked several friends and family last week, they all said airlines, so perhaps this is news to a lot of us.

I learned this fact while attending the IoT Tech Conference in London on January 23-24th 2017, where 5,000 people attended to hear and learn what IoT is all about and how companies are using this technology.

Granted, not many people came to the IoT conference to hear about the safety aspects of elevators, but they were interested to understand how elevators now have many connected sensors embedded into operating lifts which provide a complete new level of insight and intelligence that is taking the elevator industry into the digital era.

This was a moment of sudden realization for me: the fact that many longstanding companies and services that generations of people have been using for hundreds of years are now at the forefront of the latest industrial revolution. Yet it seems likely that people are assuming it is the digital based companies that are leading the way.

The fact that some of the oldest companies in the world are using IoT today is testament that any company can gain business value from this exploding amount of IoT data. This rings true especially when you consider British Gas who presented their IoT success story at the Qlik-sponsored track at the IoT Tech Conference recently. British Gas, whose origins go back over 200 years and were the world’s 1st public gas supplier, are today using Smart Metering Data Analytics to change energy usage behaviors of their 21 million account holders.

When it comes to #IoT, who’s leading the charge? Find out in this #Qlik blog post:

Smart meters alone will mean huge increases in energy usage data. British Gas expects the data will increase with smart meters from 60 million data points in 2016 to over 140 billion by 2020. Those attending the conference were able to understand how British Gas securely manages the size and complexity of smart data, and how they connect it to everything else they know about their customers to interpret data into meaningful and actionable insights.

The benefit this brings to British Gas is the ability to offer accurate bills to the consumer. However, the exciting part is the data and analytics available to understand consumer behavior. This allows tailored products to be offered to their consumers such as Free Energy Usage on a Sunday.

Another longstanding company, Rentokil, which has been providing services that protect people from the dangers of pest-borne disease since 1925, are now leveraging connected IoT digital devices to deliver new levels of proactive risk management against the threat of pest infestation. For instance, they can map weather patterns with rodent behavior or track swarms of insects as they cross territories.

The cloud-based platform is used by Rentokil to provide visualizations of data from Rentokil’s IoT product roll out. So far, Rentokil has extended its range of connected rodent control products to over 20,000 digital devices, running in 12 countries globally and generating more than three million pieces of data. These IoT units can automatically alert technicians when a rodent is caught, while customers are kept informed through the Rentokil online portal.

So if like me, you thought you have to be working for a new generational digital company to be associated with IoT, think again. It is the longstanding businesses and services leading the way in the IoT 4th industrial revolution.

 

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