I have been following with interest the productisation of sensors and associated technologies for a while.  The trends are cheaper, smaller and broader in their capabilities.

At the IoT Expo I saw how ‘Splunk’ can easily industrialise the whole data capture – validation – formatting – unification and storage challenge at scale.  And this is a pay as you go, cloud-based platform which operates in data gathering and reporting / analysis modes in near real-time (down to the second resolution).

Yesterday was the icing on the COTS IoT cake… Circuit, the radical unified communications platform created by Siemens / Unify and recently snapped up by ATOS,  looks like it will get enough investment to be a serious player.

The ‘aha’ was thinking about how this new platform could be easy to integrate (they already have lots of pre-built connectors) so that it can deliver connectivity from post-processing of real-world IoT data into the heart of the business process environment.   Oh so cool in my humble opinion!

Following the post from Mark Shaw about automation / digitalisation in supply chains, there is a real example of the benefit of a connection from the IoT domain into the business process environment. When the feedback loop, perhaps driven by a stock sensor or a countdown of stock can initiate a re-stocking process.  Clearly the purchasing / procurement manager would want notification of this event and may want to initiate a new negotiation with a supplier or perhaps agree an earlier delivery date to meet production schedules?

I wonder if any Hiveminders would like to join me in an exploratory venture in this domain?  

Please message me if you would like to discuss further