Wouldn’t it be fancy to control your fridge temperature remotely? How about virtually buying medicine from a mobile vending machine?
Well, we are now being ushered into the Internet of Everything. This era marks the beginning of interconnectivity of people, machines and data together. And it has slowly started.
I know it sounds like a movie from Hollywood, but Cisco is investing billions of dollars to create a standard platform that would be able to connect all of these things and assist them to ‘communicate’ with each other.
In the future for example, cars will be able to communicate with each other, eliminating fatal accidents and making traffic lights irrelevant. Cars would know when to stop and how to avoid hitting oncoming vehicles.
Another example would be the physical shopping cart, would be able to tell the supermarket vendors on where in the store their customers are spending more time and what they keep on buying.
Howard Charney, Senior Vice President, office of the President at Cisco told of the great changes that are coming to the world at the ongoing AfricaCom conference in Cape Town South Africa.
“The bad news is that only one percent of things are connected to the internet,” Charney said. This means that there is a huge area of growth for this market.
“It is going to create a tsunami of data. But it is not about the amount of data but what you do with the data,” Charney added.
He also revealed that Cisco has a department under research that is working on a smart car where they will be effectively connected to service providers.
And the growth projections for this technology phase is immense. According to projections, the Internet of Everything will generate a revenue of US$14.4 trillion in the next ten years. Broken down, these sectors will benefit: Assets Utilization: 2.5 trillion, Employee productivity 2.5 trillion, Supply Chain and Logistics 2. 7 trillion, Customer experience 3.7 trillion, Innovation 3.0 trillion.
Charney predicts that in the next 5 year or so the technology will start to be implemented in major cities in developed countries and 10 years in emerging cities.
