Distilling the Internet of Things

There are so many articles and buzz around the Internet of Things (IoT) these days – even our own blog. We recently posted one about how IoT devices are only as good as the network on which they run. I agree, but also argue that IoT is only as good (or as useful) as the back-end tools that help to crunch, distill and display all that data into a format that we can put to good use.

That can really be the difficult part. Exactly what needs to be captured? How much information do we keep or store? What is the most efficient way to display and communicate the results? Are there additional pieces of data needed from other devices, systems or sources? What tools are necessary to obtain value from all this stuff? It gets pretty complicated very quickly. It all really depends on the problems we are trying to solve.

Back to networks, just think of all the good and useful information within your physical network if there was an IoT device that collected, tracked and displayed information about your network. It would be chock full of useful information, such as the best way to provide service to a certain location, where all the downstream connections on a server are being decommissioned and where in the office building is a specific laptop using a certain IP address.

Fortunately, we do have that within AIM (Automated Infrastructure Management) systems. If you agree that the basic definition of an IoT device is one that is connected to the Internet and shares data with other IoT systems and devices, then an AIM system certainly meets that criteria. The software component of an AIM system crunches all that data and information and distills it into a consumable format to solve real world problems. Using an open, standard Application Programming Interface (API), all of this valuable data can be leveraged across other enterprise applications (a topic that is probably worth a whole blog of its own). AIM really is a great example of IoT at work for us.

See a few examples on our new demo tool and let us know how we can help you.