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What's not to love about IoT – you can spy on customers as they arrive

Another set of terrifyingly Orwellian use cases

IPExpo Siloed databases will be the downfall of your Internet of Things venture, warned Avaya’s chief technologist Jean Turgeon on stage at IPExpo Europe today.

Turgeon’s talk, titled IoT: Forget the hype, this is reality, didn’t really live up to the promise of its name, though he did make a few good points in amongst the subtle plugging of Avaya’s commercial offerings.

“The perimeter is everywhere within your enterprise,” he told an audience of about 100 people at London’s Excel conference centre, warning of the omnipresent security threat that world+dog is queueing up to sell solutions for.

However, hawking security tech wasn’t what Turgeon was there for. Instead he talked about infrastructure, and how the traditional approach won’t pay dividends.

“In the past we had siloed databases. There’s no interaction between all of those. While analytics were possible it’s very siloed. As we move into IoT we need to move into the methodology of integrated big data analytics. If those databases continue to be siloed, you will not generate the right outcome,” he thundered.

“Look at what we just experienced,” he continued, referring to a brief power blip that KO’d all of the AV gear at the start of his talk. “We gotta be able to bring multiple services or a single converged infrastructure and do that within compliance, in accordance with compliance.”

He gave a practical example based around medical IoT devices being used in a hospital: “Anyone getting into a hospital, connecting to the guest Wi-Fi network or penetrating your firewall could easily discover a medical device and connect to it. We’ve contributed to open source with a concept that allows a phone-home methodology that ensures medical devices are completely isolated through a virtual network.”

In common with a Comms365 talk earlier today, he also went a bit left-field, talking about potential future use-cases for IoT tech. Instead of a perennially nagging smartphone, though, he talked about harnessing video surveillance to improve the customer experience, using the example of a car pulling into a B2C firm’s car park: “I want to trigger a workflow. The workflow is about changing the experience I have. Detect the licence plate of this individual and whenever they’re coming into your hotel, your bank, this is about customising their experience… this is how IoT video surveillance can trigger the right workflow."

The rest of his talk continued in similar vein, though – as is common amongst bigger businesses muscling on the IoT world – he took a swipe at the term Internet of Things itself: “Is an analogue phone an IoT device? Is a digital phone an IoT device? Through a workflow I can make an analogue phone ring. The IoT definition is very broad.”

Overall his talk was a broad-brush overview of the IoT and how Avaya is putting together use cases to entice industry to adopt it. Whether the wider world will be happy with the idea of persistent, personalised surveillance remains to be seen. ®

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