The Internet of Things (IoT) has moved rapidly from intriguing concept to key strategy objective that companies know they must pursue to transform their business and customer experience. In fact, a Forrester survey commissioned by Arm earlier this year found more than 60 percent of respondents believe their IoT investments have or will fundamentally change their business models. More than half already are seeing improvements in operational efficiency. (You can download the Forrester report here).
But many companies not that far down the deployment path run into a roadblock, namely complexity: The complexity of what’s required for a useful solution; the complexity of the sheer number of vendors and technologies to consider; the complexity of the interoperability of data types and myriad of connectivity choices and how to connect everything securely into their legacy ERP systems.
Many of these challenges are laid out in a fascinating, in-depth logistics-industry study undertaken by SJ Consulting; more about that later.
IoT opportunity is at hand
In my conversations with customers in the logistics world including retailers, transportation, and 3PLs (third-party logistics), they know there’s enormous value in embracing IoT and leveraging the vast amounts of untapped data that await them to transform their business. But they are daunted by where to begin. They know they want solutions that are flexible and scalable, secure and efficient, but they have little patience for navigating a dense forest of options to stitch together an IoT solution for themselves. In short, they’re looking for packaged solutions and platforms that can speed their time-to-data-insight. And they want to understand the ROI for their business.
Arm has worked relentlessly for years to conceive and deliver hardware IP solutions to support companies’ IoT ambitions. More recently–seeing a need for solutions that span hardware and software–Arm launched the Pelion IoT platform. Pelion IoT platform enables organizations to connect and manage their IoT devices and data, removing much of the friction and confusion from the process of building an IoT solution. In short, it is a platform customers yearn for.
For developers and business leaders, Pelion IoT platform accelerates the time-to value of IoT deployments by helping you easily connect trusted IoT devices on global networks, seamlessly administer them, and extract real-time data from them to drive competitive advantage.
To date, Arm’s IoT services manage more than 30 petabytes of customer data, handle more than 300,000 queries a day and ingest more than 2 million records. The more than 900 customers that use the services have more than 140 Arm ecosystem partners and 350,000 developers to help them along their IoT journey. This has been recognized broadly: Arm Treasure Data was recently added to the Gartner Magic Quadrant analysis (published Feb. 13, 2018 by Adam Ronthal, Roxane Edjlali, and Rick Greenwald) of data-management and analytics companies.
Logistics firms embracing IoT
In the logistics space, customers want real-time visibility on shipments with fewer barcode scans. They want to move from just tracking things from point A to point B, to capturing and tracking more data, seamlessly managing all the different data types and connecting this treasure trove of data into their existing ERP systems.
Retailers are looking to IoT to have better shopper data, both in the physical and digital stores.Merchandising and marketing functions in retail are evolving to become more effective in the omnichannel world: A McKinsey survey found that two-thirds of their time was spent gathering data, managing expectations and sitting in meetings; only one third of their time was invested in strategy, analytics and insights.
Leading-edge customers, such as Shiseido, the world’s third-largest cosmetics company, use Arm’s data platform to ingest, integrate, store, prepare and then discover vast amounts of data, including loyalty membership data, second-party data such as media website viewing data, and third-party public data-management platform (DMP) information.
This embrace has improved Shiseido’s CRM engagement and ad performance, given its teams improved data analysis and visualization and delivered a 20 percent increase in revenue from loyalty members. This led to an 11 percent increase in overall revenue.
Logistics-solutions provider Zebra Technologies’ real-time load-monitoring solution SmartPack Trailer installed at warehouse doors helps optimize loading and ensure the right package ends up in the right truck. Additionally, Zebra is using the Pelion IoT Platform to manage ruggedized mobile Android computers used by large retailers around the globe.
These and countless other companies are moving quickly to exploit the vast benefits that the connected IoT will bring to help them unlock data to transform their businesses.
A new report from SJ Consulting (download the study) lays out not only the challenges that this transformational technology brings butthe pathways to exploiting IoT to improvement businesses. In it, you’ll find:
- Analysis of how the retail, technology, transportation and logistics industries are merging in response to Amazon
- Details on new competitive threats industry incumbents are facing
- Insight on the strategic partnerships industry players are forming to compete with Amazon
- Industry and category-specific predictions for how companies will remain competitive
- Analysis of how retailers are adopting IoT-enabled omnichannel marketing strategies
- How retailers are adopting AI and machine learning to optimize inventory planning and merchandizing.
Conclusion
In the era of IoT, companies need to disrupt themselves, to rethink the processes and solutions that have served them well for years before their competitors do it for them.
We believe that by 2035 there will be a trillion connected devices delivering orders of magnitude more data than we see today. Arm and its partners are delivering the solutions that will enable that future, a future that is happening right now.
I’d love to hear about your experiences with IoT and how we might work together to help you achieve your IoT data visions.
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