In my day job at ARM I recently led a project intended to create an ecosystem of interoperating IoT systems on our Cambridge headquarters site, a typical business park. In these slides I introduce the idea behind why interoperability is important and the connected assets and their users on the ARM HQ site. I explain how we used a site-wide HyperCat to create an "ARM site IoT directory", and how that helped us as IoT customers and also our IoT-vending suppliers. The project was funded by the UK's Technology Strategy Board, under its IoT Ecosystem Demonstrator competition.
3. 3
An IoT Hypothesis
Connected assets should be
able to work together
Reduces costs of deploying assets
and applications, or increases the
benefits realised from them, or both
Things and systems
with information about
the real world
environment
As easily as possible
They can discover, gain access to
and use each others’ resources,
creating an ecosystem of interacting
consumers and service providers
4. 4
An IoT Hypothesis
Things
connected to
the internet
VALUE
TIME
NOT TRUE: things
connected to the internet
Network effects where every
new application benefits
from previous ones:
Internet of Things
VALUE
TIME
TRUE: network effect
5. 5
ARM site ecosystem
A typical business park
~1400 people, 4 buildings
ARM Facilities Management
Interested in instrumenting car parks,
energy use.
ARM Sustainable Corporate Development
Interested in tracking and improving ARM’s
environmental footprint, including buildings
energy use, travel, commutes and home
working
ARM IT Employee Systems Group
Interested in systems of general benefit to
employees – email, holiday bookings, etc.
Keen to improve meeting room availability.
ARM employees
Interested in own home electricity use, in
finding available meeting rooms on the fly, in
using and adding to the ARM datasphere
generally.
Service Providers
EnLight car park lighting
IntelliSense HVAC plant monitoring
AlertMe room occupancy and home energy
monitoring
Service providers’ other customers
City councils, road authorities, fabs, factories,
homeowners, industrial plant vendors, energy
and telecoms utilities, IoT developers
7. 7
Should ARM site IoT assets be able to work together?
Data consumers
Data
feeds
ARM SITE Red Ninja ARM
app
Corporate
sustainability data
IntelliSense
building analytics
Employee
systems
EnLight car park lighting &
temperature ✔ ✔
IntelliSense building plant ✔ ✔
AlertMe meeting room sensors ✔ ✔✔✔
AlertMe home energy kits ✔ (✔)
ARM meeting room booking feed ✔
ARM sensor hub feeds ✔
ARM site is one of numerous ‘contexts’ (and instances
of contexts) in which assets are potentially relevant to
one another
Some primary assets are useful
to one another
… some are obviously
infrastructural, i.e. they can serve
multiple applications. Others won’t
be so obvious
Secondary users often include
dashboards, visualisers, normalisers,
rules engines, analysis tools, research
Use cases for sharing increase with number of feeds
and apps, both of which grow over time
… Access control makes it easy and safe to find useful
combos
8. 8
Should ARM site IoT assets be able to work together?
Yes!
ARM is realising additional benefits
Meeting room availability app(s)
Yes, there are additional costs
Interestingly they can all be considered
reusable infrastructure that can be adopted
by ARM IT: root catalogue, sensors, access
points.
HyperCat approach means suppliers can
integrate without ARM running a big project,
making overall cost much lower than an
traditional integration project.
Each of the 3 commercial systems are
realising business benefits
Publishing and indexing feeds lets them offer
their customers similar benefits to ARM
Their customers can ask their other suppliers
to publish and index feeds similarly
EnLight: consuming council’s other connected
assets into their EnTalk dashboard
AlertMe: rearchitected to partition devices
from application
IntelliSense: publishing feeds to industrial
plant vendors and factory operators
9. 9
Open IoT Take-Aways
Connected assets should be able to work together
Composable data sources and applications do create more value than siloed solutions.
HyperCat enables composability
We already knew every device is more useful for being connected. We demonstrated an ecosystem
that makes those devices even more useful for being interconnected.
HyperCat and tools like FeedLocker let end users invest in their own IoT infrastructure: connected
assets that serve multiple applications.
It’s about people working well together too
IoT assets are not public assets – still need to broker access
Per-context HyperCats encourage innovation, if supported with community, tools, hackathons, access
..
.. and infrastructure. End users should make IoT infrastructure part of their building upgrade plans.