The Internet of Things: Reality or Hype?
From A day in the life as the director of IBM’s Zurich Research Lab:
Last week I had the privilege to attend SAP Research’s International Research Forum(IRF) in Dresden. The IRF, which took place for the fourth time, is an annual global brain-storming event where SAP bring together industrial and academic partners from all over the world to discuss and debate (in a friendly way) topics of interest to SAP (Research) and their clients (which pretty much are all businesses big enough to care about automating their back- and
front-office).
This years event was dedicated to the Internet of Things (IoT). We were asked to define what this might mean, when and if it would happen, who needs to do what to make it happen and how we knew it had happened.
We tried to identify potential “killer applications” – I hate that word – that would justify the investments and make somebody really rich. I don’t believe we came up with a single answer here, however we agreed that the energy business (and environment) would be first be impacted by IoT as government and private enterprise are most likely to invest there.
More info here.

