OptumSoft is at the forefront of developing new technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT). We invite you to read our Internet of Things Opportunity and Business Case to learn how our technology may be able to help you achieve your business and technology goals.

Internet of Things: Opportunity and Business Case

Introduction

Industry analysts and companies are touting the Internet of Things (IoT) as bigger than the Internet. It is attracting investments in new products and technologies ranging from new kinds of sensors, gateway devices to manage sensors and collect information, message broker systems and protocols, and cloud services.

Major areas for growth in IoT will be in the areas of Industrial enterprises, energy, and transportation.

To some degree, this is a good example of an old maxim, “It takes a long time to become an overnight success.” A lot of the technologies, product concepts and protocols have been around for a long time.

On the other hand, the availability of low-cost sensor technologies combined with low-power, low-cost processors which has been driven by the mobile devices ecosystem, is making it feasible to use sensors and collect information from places that were not possible until recently. At the other end of the spectrum, cloud services available today that enable the collection, reporting and analysis of massive amounts of information at extremely low cost per transaction,

Despite many large and small enterprises already making large investments in these areas, OptumSoft sees significant need and as a result large potential for its technologies to improve products and services across the spectrum of IoT devices and services.

IoT Deployment Challenges

As people and systems become dependent on IoT capabilities, expectations for scale, availability, and security are going to change. All of these are important in many cloud-networked environments today, the concept of “scalability” takes on new meaning when it applies to billions of connected devices, and security requirements for connected vehicles and smart grid use cases may exceed that of any other area where networked computers are used. OptumSoft is ideally suited for both requirements.

Problems OptumSoft Addresses

OptumSoft TACC’s® capabilities address areas that will be crucially important to realize the promise of IoT.

Continuous operation – OptumSoft provides features to enable High Availability (HA) without burdening the developers writing business logic with responsibility to incorporate HA code, for edge gateway devices to message brokers, and cloud services.

Elastic scale – OptumSoft’s TACC distributed systems framework meets the needs of systems developers from small devices such as mobile phones and embedded microcomputers, to clustered cloud applications. Since IoT will require connectivity to, in some cases, billions of devices, a robust distributed architecture is an important advantage.

Security and fault containment – With TACC’s microservice-oriented approach to business logic, failures and bugs in one single-threaded process module are isolated to just that module, and bug fixes can be deployed by upgrading the specific process module in service.

In-service upgradability – OptumSoft’s TACC framework supports in-service upgradability of both databases and applications processes, enabling literally continuous operation, which will be important for a large number of IoT use cases.

Market Sizing and Opportunity

Internet of Everything


Based on the forecast from Business Intelligence[1] shown in Figure 1, by 2018 the number of IoT connected devices will exceed the total number of smart phones, plus tablets and PCs.

John Chambers, Cisco’s Chairman and CEO stated that the Internet of Everything (IoE) represents a $US17 Trillion market.[2]

Although there are too many variables and uncertainties to attempt an estimate of OptumSoft’s market opportunity, it is clear that multiple sub-segments of the total market, including the embedded and cloud software market is in multiple billions of U.S. dollars.

Conclusion

OptumSoft believes it can succeed in this market because as IoT usage increases, solutions providers will demand a higher level of scalability, in service upgradability, manageability, and security than most products will be able to deliver. OptumSoft TACC is an ideal fit for the additional capabilities that customers are likely to demand in the future.

[1] http://www.businessintelligence.com

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-08/cisco-ceo-pegs-internet-of-things-as-19-trillion-market.html