Intertwining IoT and AI in software solutions

Arun Shankar
April 3, 2019 1:23 pm

As a Group, opportunities around Internet of Things are addressed in a couple of different ways. One division that is totally focused on it is WebNMS. They provide the IoT infrastructure, a programmable environment to create IoT applications..

WebNMS was the Group’s first company as well, 22 years ago and it essentially was IoT technology before. The business was to provide agents that can go out and instrument anything. Now it is called Internet of Things and it is popular. What is interesting about Internet of Things is that you can not only set up these applications, but you can monitor these applications as well and that all happens with WebNMS.

The adoption of IoT in terms of companies making revenue, are far less than would have been expected and there is certainly a lot of hype around IoT. While there are a lot of use cases for it, there are very few vendors that are creating multiple billion-dollar businesses.

It is possible that IoT needs additional functionality in the way of artificial intelligence to control devices independently, and this is intertwined. You need good software management to have a real IoT solution. The better the software management, the faster something will scale out. IoT technologies are also being adapted within business applications like CRM to create applications that can support and feed service management

Artificial intelligence is taking IT management to the next level. In the early days, IT management was all about just making sure systems were operational or uptime. How systems were actually performing came after that. The focus subsequently moved to performance management and a lot of that was built into IT performance applications.

As systems became more critical, the focus has turned to root cause analysis. In other words, if something goes wrong, how do you figure out what the problem is. So, the next thing is artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is doing things that human do not do very well. Being able to take multiple data points from all different angles and make some semblance out of that information. For this security is a great example, that can use all these data points.

Artificial intelligence brings it altogether and says, this is what an employee normally does. But all of a sudden, an employee may be very active elsewhere. What is going to happen first with artificial intelligence, is it will help to detect information that you would normally not see with the naked eye. While presenting that information it will automatically take care of a lot of actions.

Automation is another element of artificial intelligence and is based on machine learning. Chatbots add a lot of self-service capability and use rule-based machine learning. In the region, the Group has grown by more than 25% as an average and that is a big number for an IT management company.

Key takeaways

  • While there are a lot of use cases for it, there are few vendors creating billion-dollar businesses.
  • It is possible IoT needs additional functionality in the way of artificial intelligence to control devices independently.
  • You need good software management to have a real IoT solution.
  • Artificial intelligence is doing things that human do not do very well.
  • Automation is another element of artificial intelligence and is based on machine learning.

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