Thoughts on the 6th Colombo IoT meetup

I suppose I have to leave this post here for the lack of a better place.

The meetup was titled Rise with Cloud Intelligence and staying with the theme the talks revolved around IoT PaaS offerings. The first couple of speakers(employed at Persistent Systems and Virtusa Polariz respectively) talked about their experiences working with IBM Bluemix, their segments leaned more towards demonstrations and explanations towards the work they had done with the platform. I felt considering the time constraints of the event it would have been more useful had some of these talks been done at a conceptual level because at times it seemed like time was wasted explaining simple nitty gritty. Rounding up, the segment gave a holistic image of the capabilities of IBM Bluemix.

The segment on Bluemix was followed with an interesting talk on an IoT enabled PaaS solution by two gentlemen with thick american accents. The first speaker(one Dean Hamilton) started off sharing some statistics on IoT space(published by an organization going by the name of ABI research). The space according to the speaker can be divided to 3 subcategories, the device manufacturers(hardware), connectivity(business with getting the sensor data to the servers) and the server side of things(control and analytics). Common sense and the statistics shown to us said most of the big IoT money(everyone is talking about) is expected to be made in software and service category.

Interestingly, the solution Dean presented to us was aimed at the first category. An IoT enabled PaaS that device manufacturers can use to monetize sensor data pushed back to them, to get a piece of the IoT pie. He took the example of how a manufacturer of agricultural machinery (harvesters and such) could enable the sensor data to be push on to a PPaaS, be enriched with other services(aligning with the manufacturer's interests) and to be sold to any interested party(such as fertilizer manufacturers). Their solution tries to cater to this need.

As an engineer with the aim of attending such events as a way to keep in beat with happenings of the local community I walked away satisfied.