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By Doug Bartholomew
In case you hadn't noticed, our planet is getting more chipped.
Not nicked by asteroids, mind you, but just saturated with sensors and miniature devices that promise to bring a whole lot more information together. "These new devices are more instrumented, more intelligent, and more interconnected with the systems around them than in the past," observes Ken King, vice president of the Rational Systems Business at IBM.
Big Blue is predicting that by 2010, there will be 30 billion radio frequency identification tags embedded throughout the world.
As the various devices-already being deployed in such ubiquitous industries as automotive, healthcare, energy, and transportation- continue to proliferate, companies such as IBM are finding plenty of opportunity in providing the necessary software to link them together, enabling them to churn out useful information for better decision-making by both industry and consumers.
"We worked with a medical device maker to develop a smarter heart that can determine the activity level of the patient and adjust the person's blood flow accordingly," King says. "The software is driving a larger portion of the innovation in smart devices than the mechanical or electronic components."
Examples of these devices in use today are common. Some new cars come with tires containing sensors that tell the driver when a tire is low on air. Some home appliances already being sold in Europe contain sensors that communicate with the utility, reducing power consumption or shutting down altogether when there is a potential for overload on the power grid. "And we are starting to see utilities installing smart meters that are remotely configurable," King adds.
IBM's Smarter Planet initiative is focused on providing the software and services that organizations will need to build out their embedded systems to enable smart devices in their industry, whether it's transportation, health care, utilities, or automotive. "Many organizations' heritage is in the electrical and mechanical sides, and they may not have the necessary experience with the software that is needed to innovate and differentiate fast enough," King explains. "We have the framework and capabilities to integrate the software with the mechanical and electronic parts of the products."
For CIOs, of course, the implication is clear-- the growing mountain of information being transmitted to corporations about their products and services in the field has to not only be collected and managed, but more important, it needs to be put to use.
"The bottom line is that so many things are being instrumented, that companies today can track their products in the production cycle, as well as in the marketplace as they are being used," says Dan Olds, founder and principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group, an IT research and analysis firm in Beaverton, Ore. "For the CIO, the real problem will be using that data effectively. I see this data becoming the new weapon in the business wars in a new era we are entering that I call 'The Age of Analytics.'"
He recommends that CIOs prepare now for this new age of analytics by creating the necessary infrastructure to successfully deal with it. "For the CIO, it means getting together an analytics infrastructure to use the data provided by all these smart devices," he adds.
Crunching the mountains of data that are derived from smart devices, though, promises to be a challenge to IT groups. "For some CIOs, this kind of processing looks more like supercomputing," Olds says, because it involves massive amounts of data that must be crunched and then massaged into meaningful formats. "How well you can crunch that data and come to a quicker answer gives you advantage."
In the electric power industry, one of the companies that is farthest along with a program to install smart meter technology is Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in San Francisco. PG&E, which began its installation campaign in 2006, had installed 2.6 million SmartMeter electric and gas meters as of early June. The company's goal is to install 10 million of the smart devices by the end of 2011.
It's a big undertaking, and it's not without an impact on PG&E's IT infrastructure. "We've deployed a whole new set of RF infrastructure to support these smart devices," says William Devereaux, senior director of PG&E's SmartMeter program. He says other impacts on the IT organization include the unprecedented volume of data derived as a result of ourly reading of millions of meters, as well as the need for new analytic systems to sift through the data.
In those areas that now have PG&E's SmartMeters, the utility is able to save money by being able to perform meter reading remotely, instead of having an employee go from house to house. So far, though, PG&E is not using its smart devices to communicate with home appliances (see sidebar article).
The SmartMeters enable consumers to view their usage hourly and make adjustments in the amount of energy they use according to time of day. In exchange for reducing power usage during these critical peak hours, consumers receive a 3-cent per kilowatt hour discount on power used at all other times during the summer months, a PG&E spokesman says.
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