First came the connection of PCs to the Internet, then the smartphone, now comes the networking of “things”. With each new device class, the number of network nodes has increased dramatically. The Internet of Things (IoT) already measures around 30 billion devices – from the refrigerator at home to the intelligent pump in the power plant – and is still at the very beginning.
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If there is a problem, it is less the number of devices or the expected exponential growth. Rather, it is the fact that each of these devices does something different in its own way. “IoT devices mostly exist in silos,” says Ralf Schnell, Senior Platform Evangelist at ServiceNow. “Dishwashers, door openers, light switches or sockets in a smart home scenario are each from a different manufacturer and each have different apps for controlling them.” However, each of these devices is “smart” only by itself.
However, this fundamentally limits both the efficiency of the operation and the complexity and quality of the IoT-based services. If a company operates various IoT device classes as part of its services, it cannot initially network and intelligently manage them, because the devices do not initially communicate with each other. “The silos make it impossible to do this efficiently and proactively,” says Ralf Schnell. There is simply too much data in too many different data pots. If, on the other hand, IoT devices are networked with one another, services can be orchestrated that are much more complex and complex than what the individual device can achieve.
“If I then manage these structures intelligently and proactively, can operate them with high reliability and cost-efficiently and can avoid failures, then this is a very high quality service that can be marketed well because it will experience a high level of customer satisfaction and acceptance”, says Schnell. A common operating basis is needed to exploit the synergies that can arise from the interaction between the different IoT device classes.
ServiceNow sees its own Now Platform as ideally positioned for this task, has intensified development in this area in recent years and can now boast several larger pilot projects for its new product “IoT Connected Operations”. Dreamworld, for example, is an amusement park that monitors the cooling of its food via IoT, from the management of the sensors to the complete documentation to the maintenance of the devices. More about that in this video.
Curious? Here you get an insight into ServiceNow Connected Operations