Unlocking Your Business Value: Leveraging Java ... - IoT Now...Business Value from devices. The...

Summary Whitepaper

Unlocking Your Business Value:Leveraging Java on Devices

Sponsored by Oracle

Copyright © 2013 Beecham Research Ltd. All rights reserved. http://beechamresearch.com 1

Introduction

The objective of this summary whitepaper is to outline the key points from the recent Oracle webcast focused on Unlocking Business Value from devices.

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) opens up all types of service driven opportunities, delivering increased efficiencies, bet-ter customer value and improved quality of life. Realizing the full potential of the Internet of Things requires that we change how we view and build devices which provide the core foundation of services: rapidly transforming data to information to value. From home to industry to public sector and healthcare, the focus is on how devices can grow in intelligence, interoperability with other devices, systems and services, and drive timely decisions, while delivering real business return for all.

The Internet of Things Changes Everything

The Internet of Things (IoT) follows the Industrial and IT Revo-lutions and will have an equally wide ranging impact, with the potential to reach “things” – devices – everywhere. It will change everything, including how things are made and used and even our knowledge of the planet.

IoT will feature intelligent devices at the edges of networks. Fur-ther, IoT devices will not be connected to just the Internet – un-like most of today’s solutions, they will also be connected to oth-er devices, as well as the Internet. This will result in a composite, decentralized environment, with intelligence at the edge and on the Internet, and in the cloud.

Responses to a recent Beecham Research survey of M2M/IoT market players bears this out.

Figure 1. Do you see an increasing need for real time decision-making influencing a move to more intelligence required at the network edge?

Figure 2. To what extent do you expect the level of network traffic to/from your connected devices and products to change during the next 5 years?

Expected level of change in network traffic to/from connected devices during the next 5 years: Virtually all respondents expected this network traffic to increase. This also reflects the expectation of a huge increase in the amount of data expected to be generated by connected devices. Much of this will be processed at the network edge for a wide range of services requiring fast decision-making. Further processing will then also be required at the data center for wider shar-ing and this is expected to greatly increase network traffic to beyond current levels.

Today, with devices talking to other devices, interconnected pro-cesses will take place locally and globally; automated actions, based on pre-determined rules, will be happening everywhere.

As the number of connected things increases rapidly over the next five years and beyond, the way services are defined, built, and delivered will change dramatically. For example, a car con-nected from time of purchase and always connected to the manu-facturer for service monitoring purposes changes the relationship between manufacturer and user – through such “always on” con-nections new services will be enabled. These are now appearing in all areas and industry sectors, including industrial automation, vehicle telematics, healthcare, and home automation, to name a few. (See Figure 3.) New composite solutions created by connect-ing devices to devices and the Internet will generate real value, which can provide both reduced costs and new revenue opportu-nities to businesses across all markets.

Source Beecham Research

Source Beecham Research

Don't Know 13%

No 6%

Yes 81%


The Path to IoT Services

New IoT services will require a reduction in complexity of both the development and management of IoT systems. This can be accomplished by increased interoperability and, closely related, the development and use of standards. Security will also remain a fundamental consideration as device manage-ment and provisioning are perfected. Not only are potential threats increasing, but security has also rapidly gained in im-portance in the market as companies begin to use their M2M/IoT solutions for business-critical activities and to share M2M/IoT data more widely across the enterprise.

Reducing complexity will drive innovation by helping to improve developer productivity for new applications. This will also reduce time-to-market for new services and extend device lifecycles, particularly with an increased emphasis on software, which can be updated remotely.

Existing IT services include data centres processing large volumes of data and feeding information to customers through the web or call centres, but this can be laborious and highly reactive, re-quiring someone somewhere to invoke the need for service. IoT presents an opportunity to radically change this – intelligent

devices and gateways on the edge will drive self-invoking services. Increased data capture with real-time analytics and reduced human interaction will create new value and result in new services, the IoT’s primary opportunity.

Regarding new services, some real world IoT applications already exist. Examples include tele-health and the smart home, where a new breed of hierarchical gateways can connect tiny sensing nodes measuring blood pressure, glucose levels, heart rate, etc., to the Cloud very efficiently. Data then moves to a healthcare provider and doctor, who may choose to engage data analyt-ics to gain insight. This leads to better and likely lower costs for healthcare by managing patient data in near real-time, 24/7.

In the Smart Grid, local power outages can be managed in sec-onds, not hours, with smart meters and gateways. Outages can be communicated to the Cloud then to the relevant power station, where power can be automatically managed, resources quickly reallocated to the affected area. This represents not only a better level of service to home and businesses but also greater service efficiency and lower costs for the utility.

In Supply Chain logistics, sensors can monitor fruit ripening levels in refrigerated train cars, communicating this and location data to the Cloud; if necessary, instructions to re-route cars to the

Figure 3. M2M/IoT Sector Map showing M2M/IoT service sectors -- industry verticals -- and a sampling of the applications and devices found within each service sector, adding up to a very wide and still expanding total M2M/IoT range of services.


nearest distribution center can be sent back to those cars from the cloud, as well as to relevant distribution centers, resulting in cost savings. The applications are truly nearly endless.

Challenges in Moving Towards an IoT Service Platform

Creating this path to IoT services is not without challenges and complexities. With devices increasing from a few hun-dred million to billions and tens of billions, much, much more data will be produced. This will come not just from devices but from other sources such as social networks, as well. In addition, devices will need to be reactive to these other sources. Business and service decisions cannot be made from data alone – without decisions, there is no value.

Turning a deluge of data into life changing actions and fueling new services will involve very intelligent devices – always on, connected to a variety of sensors, and running multiple software applications. These will create a need for “Big Data” high-frequency and fast data analysis for instant decision making and the automation of information flows.

Automated, real-time responsiveness will enable customer service differentiation and help reduce costs. A successful responsiveness model will enable applications for custom-er-facing services by moving actions and decisions closer to the devices. This allows for more timely decisions, which can be crucial in applications like tele-healthcare, where timely actions and decisions are required for remote patient care.

IoT Device Changes and Challenges

A more detailed view of these challenges as they apply to devices, even as devices themselves are changing quickly, includes various factors and trends such as the following:

Diversity: including highly diverse and rapidly changing use cases and related technologies. As IoT begins to touch everything, high levels of device diversity will be created. This is also likely to create a network effect and increased investment – more will become possible even as diversity grows.

Commonality: Reinventing and reintegrating must-have features such as management and security will be too costly. As a result, achieving standardization across diverse devices will be essential

Connectivity: Hardware capabilities and connectivity possibilities are evolving rapidly. Embedded systems are currently enjoying a renaissance thanks in large part to continued processor miniaturiza-tion. Many connectivity options exist and continue to evolve; WiFi,

Zigbee, Bluetooth, etc., in the home sector, for example, but this only adds to device complexity and diversity.

Datafication: Volume and value of data is gaining importance as a business driver. Extracting value from much greater data volume is an important challenge, especially closer to the edge device for mission critical applications, as noted earlier.

Development: The value is truly in software, but embedded software development can be difficult, whether in connecting to a chip-set or simulating an external environment as part of a testing cycle. A shift in value from hardware to software is taking place as embedded computing continues to move from consumer electronics into the world of IT and devices become service-enabled. Developing software for embedded platforms may not be a trivial pursuit, however, particularly with mission or even life critical applications such as tele-health. This shift away from hardware and Bill of Material (BOM) costs towards software will heighten the value of reusable componentry.

Flexibility: Time-to-market and flexibility are keys to success. Devices must get to market quickly and may often be deployed for years. The ability to simplify development and reuse code across multiple IoT applications is becoming commonplace and a way to manage overall device costs.

IoT Device Needs

Businesses have moved beyond browsers and now commonly sup-port a wide array of smart phones and tablets. IoT will drastically change the device landscape, increasing the need for businesses to build programs to support many devices, in many sizes and poten-tially in many markets.

Devices in an IoT world must also be able to provide services and responsiveness. Non-negotiable attributes must enable:

• Security – access to operation and data must be restricted to authorized personnel;

• Availability – no matter where a device is physically located it must be immediately available from a network perspective;

• Performance – a device must be able to process data quickly;

• Scalability – what works in small numbers of devices must also work with greater volumes as adoption increases;

• The ability to be always on, including the ability to work off-line – devices may have “sleep” modes to conserve power consumption but must be always able to perform when needed;

• Reliable connectivity – no IoT application can work without it; and

• The ability to be remotely manageable. Devices must be easily upgradeable, allowing new services or software updates or patches to be “pushed” to them, wherever they are in operation.


Vendor Ecosystem Needs

IoT device supply chains and ecosystems have specific needs, too. Device manufacturers always need to balance BOM costs and profit, switching hardware component suppliers as neces-sary. A focus on price alone may lead to a commodity-like situation – innovation and retaining value will be key.

Platform and service providers who can get to market more quickly will have a competitive edge; doing this will require readily available resources, including being able to quickly develop software and reuse it across devices and markets.

The IoT cannot develop and flourish without standards. How-ever, cross-sector diversity also entails dealing with many different regulatory requirements and increasing demands on how data is captured, processed, stored, and used. Many of these areas are new to device OEMs.

Increasing Efficiency and Reducing Costs and Risk with Java

The IoT opportunity revolves around a major acceleration of existing markets. Connecting devices to the Internet has al-ready attained a rising trajectory but the widespread adoption of a service enablement platform for devices, including sub-stantial device-to-device communication, is likely to create an inflection point. At this point, rapid accelerated IoT growth will appear, with a steeper trajectory. Here rising market demand meets more sophisticated devices connected to this platform.

As part of this, new market entrants, introducing game-chang-ing disruptions, represent a particular area for growth; new players recognize the need for a fundamental change in thinking and the technology industry will respond, providing it as it has repeatedly done in the past.

This inflection point represents a rapidly-growing services opportunity and Java is perfectly positioned to provide solid business value for embedded developments associated with this.

In an environment in which the expectation is for device prices to continually decline, making increased efficiencies key to maintaining margin, Java can provide those increased efficiencies while also reducing cost. Java offers more, how-ever, by enabling a platform for new IoT services on devices: a platform that extends to the data centre.

In an environment where value is shifting from hardware to software, Java already runs on popular computing platforms found on embedded devices, mobile phones, desktops, servers, and even supercomputers, across a broad array of hardware and operating systems. Java is extremely portable. Using it in applications provides an opportunity to create large new economies of scale while also providing greater

control of Bill of Materials (BOM).

Java has the largest developer ecosystem on the planet, with over 9 Million developers globally. This provides very strong resource availability even as the number of IoT ecosystem players using Java continues to grow.

Quality assurance consumes over 50% of costs on most projects. Using Java reduces quality assurance cycles and reinvention, enabling the use of more cycles for innova-tion, shortening time to market and increasing competitive edge.

Support is critical; an expected obligation. Sending out support engineers is very costly though; device replacement – particular-ly for hardwired devices – is also very costly. Support costs can be greatly reduced by using remote management and update. Java devices are particularly suited for remote software updating, which is especially important in markets where phone-style 18-24 month replacement cycles are not an option. An example of this is mHealth, with its limited budgets and devices requiring at least a 3-5 year return. Replacing outdated applications instead of devices greatly increases device lifecycles, in addition to reducing support costs.

Major cost reductions also result when development teams reuse code from design to design or device class to device class, or leverage code already developed in the Java com-munity.

Lastly, using Java reduces risk – Java is a globally deployed, secure, standards based platform backed by Oracle. Reduced costs, shorter time to market, longer product lifecycles, and more time to innovate and create new IoT services – this all adds up to increased ROI and growing revenue.

Copyright © 2013 Beecham Research Ltd. All rights reserved. http://beechamresearch.com 5 4

How Oracle Enables Business Value with Java

Oracle continues to make Java available for all kinds of devices, of all sizes; when developers code in Java their code can be widely used and reused across devices. This attribute of Java makes it uniquely suited for the rise of the IoT and Oracle’s parallel Internet of Things Platform efforts:

• Smart: Java enables devices to become more intelligent, remotely updateable, and able to make better “local”

decisions. This allows devices to contribute better data to back-end analytics activities and drive smarter decisions overall;

• Portable: Java enables applications to run without change across different device architectures and operating systems; and

• Flexible: Java can share portions of code among devices, aggregators, and server-side systems, giving the developer the control to put intelligence for a solution in the right place at the right time. This capability is underpinned by standards.

Figure 4. Oracle Java Platforms Overview

• Oracle Java Card: Provides strong security for the develop-ment of trusted, efficient and easy to use identity services;

• Oracle Java ME Embedded: Optimized for small devices, providing important support for on-the-fly application downloads and updates and remote operation, and the ability to add new capabilities without impacting existing functions;

• Oracle Java SE Embedded: Enables the development of highly functional, reliable, and portable applications for today’s more powerful embedded systems and multi-

service gateways; and

• Oracle Java SE: Enables development and deployment of Java applications on desktops and servers.

Driving Value Through the Supply Chain

Oracle is working with leading players in all parts of the IoT supply chain ecosystem, from System-on-Chip providers to OEMs and Network Operators. Oracle believes the change in enabling IoT services brought about by using Java will ben-efit everyone in the supply chain, whether by running Java on chipsets and boards or adopting and differentiating by standardizing on Java. Such a vision includes about 400,000 enterprise and service provider customers, making it broad and far reaching.

Figure 5. Java Impact on the Value Chain

The benefits for OEMs and ODMs device manufacturers include reducing time to market by enabling code reuse, particularly for new devices in new markets. An important issue is that of achieving long lifecyles; using a stable Java platform, remotely updateable, is ideal for 5-10+ year in market applications.

Service providers will be able to maintain Quality of Service (QOS) with Java, which has been used in set top boxes for many years – the Java platform is well established, reliable, and flexible.

Overall, many players in the value chain can benefit from the large global developer ecosystem that supports Java means that a large talent pool is available to build new IoT services that will drive revenue from new services like home automation and smart home management.

Java ME Embedded

Java Card

SECURITY SMALL EMBEDDED MEDIUM EMBEDDED LARGE EMBEDDED DESKTOP SERVER

50KB-1MB

1MB-10MB

10MB-100MB

Footprint

Java SE Embedded

100MB+

Java SE

Service Provider

System on Chip

Solution Partner OEM/ODM ISV Enterprise

Customer

Innovation/ Developer ecosystem

Easier to maintain quality of service

Portability/ No HW/SW lock-in

Shorter time to market

Extended lifecycle

Better end-user experience

Standards based/More re-usable solutions

Increased market reach

Competitive advantage

Reduced support

Reduced risk

CPU Designer


Summary

The Internet of Things changes everything. It will feature in-telligent devices at the edges of networks connected not just to the Internet but to other devices, as well. Business value will come from using the large amounts of resulting data and acting on it quickly, as closely and as automatically as possi-ble, to create new services. This represents a major disruption to the market and huge new opportunities for market play-ers – possibly much larger than Cloud -- throughout the value chain.

By enabling greater device intelligence, Java – compatible with many types of devices and supported by both the world’s largest developer community and Oracle -- is perfectly suited for achieving this vision. The benefits of incorporating Java as the standard platform for IoT are clear. It provides local de-vice intelligence, portability and flexibility, all within a secure environment.

References

Java: http://www.oracle.com/goto/javaembedded

Downloads: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/embed-ded/overview/getstarted/index.html

Oracle’s Internet of Things Platform: http://www.oracle.com/iot

Copyright © 2013 Beecham Research Ltd. All rights reserved. http://beechamresearch.com 7 6

About Beecham Research

Beecham Research is a leading market analyst and consulting firm that has specialized in the development of the rapidly-growing M2M/Internet of Things market worldwide for over a decade, since 2001. Based in Cambridge UK and in Boston US, we actively partic-ipate in initiatives aimed at achieving M2M market development and growth. Recent research has included two market-leading and widely supported studies on M2M Cloud-Based Platform Services and a study of the worldwide Satellite M2M market contracted by the European Space Agency. Ongoing research includes new busi-ness models for the Internet of Things, Smart Cities, eHealth and a particular expertise in Wearable Technology as it applies to IoT.

A particular specialty is primary research surveys involving users (adopters) and market players worldwide, in multiple languages.

Contact us at:

Website: www.beechamresearch.comEmail: [email protected] Tel: +44 (0)845 533 1758 Fax: +44 (0)845 533 1762M2M blog at: http://blog.m2mapps.com

Unlocking Your Business Value: Leveraging Java ... - IoT Now...Business Value from devices. The...

Documents

Transcript of Unlocking Your Business Value: Leveraging Java ... - IoT Now...Business Value from devices. The...