The Internet of Things will power the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Here’s how

For me, it’s mostly about the internet of things (IoT). If you think back to the dim and distant past of the Third Industrial Revolution – which was centred around information technology and digitization – applications were about people or IT processes communicating. But now it’s machines and devices that are communicating, continuously and in ever greater numbers. The promise of real-time enterprise – organizations that can respond to need and demand instantaneously – is finally becoming a reality.

Customers I speak to, particularly those in manufacturing, say the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and IoT in particular, is allowing them to transform their business models from selling a product to providing a managed service.

Products become assets that can be connected to the internet, which means they can be remotely monitored. This can help companies to better understand how assets are used, to predict when they need maintenance and to sharpen the total cost of ownership models. By knowing when faults can be avoided or their impact minimized, and with a better understanding of risk and financial exposure, companies can establish service-based contracts with service-level agreements based on reliable data.

This is all possible because the connectivity of devices has been transformed. Previously, connected devices such as vending machines needed mains charging and relied on Wi-Fi, cellular or Bluetooth connectivity. Now our connectivity requirements have expanded. We want connectivity in less accessible places: factories in remote locations, rural fields or construction sites or – in cars – potentially everywhere.

We now have power-efficient sensors and a multitude of different ways of connecting devices to cloud-based analytics, using low-power wide-area networks, 4G cellular and of course the super-efficient new 5G cellular standard, which is being designed from the ground up to enable the IoT.

By 2020 more than 50 billion things, ranging from cranes to coffee machines, will be connected to the internet.