Businesses need to ready themselves for the Internet of Everything

The Internet of Everything (IoE) will transform the way we do business, and the innovative and creative will be the ones which are most likely to succeed, says Rashish Pandey, Director of Marketing, Asia Pacific, Cisco Systems during ad::tech asean 2014 this July.

“It is happening now, and will redefine how we will do business. Every company will have to think through a services mindset: 'How to make it relevant to my customers?',” he said.

According to Pandey, the power of the IoE comes from combining three levels of interaction:

• Machine-to-machine, when sensors talk to other sensors, or the classic “Internet of Things” 
• Machine-to-people – when machines talk to people, often called data and analytics 
• People-to-people – people talk to people, also called collaboration 

“US$19 trillion is the true value at stake when we combine all of these together in the next 10 years,” Pandey said.

An example of how the IoE works could be a navigation app for a hotel in the US. Pandey showed how the app is able to give directions to destinations within the building complex though location-based Wifi, and display offers tied to merchants nearby. In the process, the app generates insights about the customer that can be used to customise subsequent experiences, making them more compelling.

Pandey shared another real-world example in which car manufacturer Volvo makes use of information from sensors placed at critical locations in the car, such as at the brakes, to improve car safety.

“These are technologies that are happening right here, right now. (You can) create visibility that you never had in your supply chain to create experiences that were not available before,” he said.

“With the IoE you are no longer starved for data. The question is 'are we ready to take that data to turn it into insights and engineer a process that makes it compelling?'” he asked.

Cisco further polled 200 business leaders about what they think of the IoE, and found that many companies are already ready to capitalise on the IoE. Eighty-six percent of respondents said it is 'important' or 'very important' to think about how to monetize it, while 51% said they would increase marketing and sales budgets to leverage on the greater understanding of customer habits.

Pandey also provided some recommendations on how to leverage on the Internet of Everything successfully. Trust will be paramount as companies will know much more about customers than they do today, and can analyse and predict behaviour in real-time, Pandey said. He advised businesses to be careful not to make customers uncomfortable with how they made use of the technology.

Leveraging on customer insights can only occur if there is an agile infrastructure to support shortened product development cycles within the organisation, he added. “In the new world you must start talking to the supply chain, to R&D. It is all about accelerating innovation,” he said.

A close partnership between the CMO and the CIO will be critical as well to ensure that the company becomes good at prototyping new services and bringing them to life. “There is nothing stopping us from a technology or cost perspective to bringing this to life. What determines the winners is how innovative and creative we are,” he said.

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