The 3 Ds of the Internet of Things

Most IoT devices will not be able to display banner ads, run commercials, or even support email, yet they'll be key channels for marketing, according to Henderson. A connected air conditioner, for example, will be able to self-diagnose a problem—like recognize that it's time to replace a filter—and trigger an alert on a consumer's smartphone app. The app will then generate a coupon or a special offer for that specific filter and voilà—a new marketing opportunity has emerged. Building that app and equipping it with various marketing functions will require the flexibility of an APaaS solution such as Bluemix, but IBM is not the only vendor to zero in on this need; big names in the CRM market now offer APaaS as well.

Salesforce.com, for example, has the Salesforce1 platform—a dual solution that leverages cloud platform Heroku for customer-facing applications and cloud platform Force.com for employee-facing apps. Heroku lets companies create customer-facing apps without the complexity of architecting them for the Web; the app building process is visual and guided. Vendors have worked to make these platforms user-friendly, and analysts have likened modern-day APaaS offerings such as Bluemix and Salesforce1 to Lego sets that make becoming a master app builder more attainable to any user.

The setup is similar on Force.com, the employee-facing side of Salesforce1, except that users also have access to the AppExchange, where they can use existing app infrastructure to build tools for sales representatives, marketers, and customer service teams.

"There's been a lot of excitement surrounding consumer adoption of wearable and IoT devices, but the reality is that they're being adopted in the enterprise as well, and there’s a lot of potential there," says Dan Debow, senior vice president of emerging technologies at Salesforce.com. While most vendors have focused on consumer app-development platforms, Salesforce is one of a few companies to take aim at the enterprise as well. Wearable devices in particular have become popular in the workforce, and Salesforce has responded to the trend with Salesforce Wear, a developer pack of customizable applications for the enterprise.

Salesforce Wear supports app development for more than a dozen different devices, including its most recent addition, the Apple Watch. The apps are open source and integrate fully with the Salesforce sales, marketing, and service clouds as well as other components of the Salesforce Customer Experience Platform to ensure that data is synced and consistent across channels and devices.

Salesforce customers across different industries have begun using the wearable-compatible apps to augment sales, marketing, and service efforts. Customer service agents who do repairs or work in the field, for example, rely on apps built for wearable headsets to view equipment manuals or knowledge management databases without having to occupy their hands; sales reps are using sales productivity apps for smart watches to track meetings and appointments without having to check their phones. "This is just the beginning. The key here is that we're giving users the freedom to design apps based on their unique business needs for their devices of choice. We're just getting started," Debow says.

Despite rapid growth in the Internet of Things market, there's still plenty of time for companies to get into the IoT game with consumer-facing experiences and employee-facing ones. The space is young, but the need to link devices, implement algorithm intelligence to harness data, and empower business users across the enterprise to develop apps is real and rising. Technology and software providers are working fast to build powerful IoT suites, but the burden of connecting the 3 Ds of the Internet of Things falls as much on the companies that use the solutions as it does on the vendors that provide them. "The true challenge," Gartner's Sommer says, "will be taking connected things and delivering connected experiences."

Associate Editor Maria Minsker can be reached at mminsker@infotoday.com.

 

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