With new ideas, new technologies and new smart products emerging every year, one big challenge for devices in the Internet of Things remains: How can we make them understand each other? A huge number of manufacturers and products using different protocols plus a wide range of platforms with non-interoperable networking technologies are making the IoT too complicated to handle.
One big challenge in the world of IoT will be to ensure devices from a range of different vendors to collaborate smoothly. One solution, and one that has proven the most popular up until now, is to connect each single device with a cloud service, collect the data and let a remote computer decide what to do next. But this is not always a very elegant way of doing things. First of all, you may need to tie in a number of gateways to collect data from the different devices which may all use different protocols. Secondly, by sending everything into the cloud first, you run the risk of higher latency. Thirdly, if the cloud server stops working or a glitch with the internet connection, the whole system may grind to a halt.
The Internet of Things, with all its players in the market, faces the same problem that the Internet faced before the days of the World Wide Web: A wide range of platforms with non-interoperable networking technologies, data silos and therefore limited interoperability, and thus, market potential. Perhaps if parallels can be drawn, maybe learnings can be too?
