By: Chris Piedmonte

IoT is quickly emerging as a very significant agent of transformation as it blends the physical and digital on-line worlds. As everyone has been told repeatedly by the consumer electronics industry, the home is a key target for applying the benefits of IoT-enabled devices. Consumers are now expecting devices and related services that will make their lives easier and more convenient. They expect their IoT-enabled home devices to evolve to new uses by working collaboratively as they become an integral part of managing their everyday home life.

By 2017, it has been estimated that 90 million people will live in smart homes. By 2020, there will be 50 billion connected devices. The latest Gartner forecast predicts that by 2020 there will be $309 billion in incremental revenue opportunity in the IoT market.

The current thinking is that the majority of this revenue will be generated on services, not on the sale of IoT-enabled devices themselves. This service revenue can be captured by the carriers, over-the-top providers and other players in the telecommunications industry if they can figure out how to monetize these services. In other words, how to spin the haystack of IoT-enabled devices, networks, existing in-home telecom devices and software into gold.

Mining this IoT-enabled gold will require overcoming three major challenges. First, an infrastructure is needed which can properly support access to IoT devices in the home.  This includes issues of connectivity, provisioning, permissions, rights management and security. Secondly, the legal and privacy issues are still very much unclear and need to be spelled out and compliance assured.  And third, it is still unclear what types of services make sense for IoT in the home. These will need to be envisioned, developed, field-tested and rolled-out simultaneously with the home devices and infrastructure.

Challenge One – IoT-Enabled Home Infrastructure

An infrastructure is needed which can properly support access to IoT devices in the home. This includes issues of connectivity, provisioning, permissions, rights management and security.

IoT-Enabled Home Devices

As anticipated, a diverse variety of IoT-enabled devices are being created for use in the home. Smart lighting, wall switches, electrical outlets, refrigerators, stoves, thermometers, home entertainment components and other devices are already available. Many IoT-enabled home devices will have native IoT capabilities built into them from the beginning, such as the smart refrigerator we keep hearing about, but older devices may be IoT-enabled by add-on IoT to monitor and control them.

However, many of these first-to-market IoT-enabled home devices are missing the necessary hardware capabilities and required software to manage issues of connectivity, provisioning, permissions, rights and security. These issues also come into play for the centralized controllers designed to manage these devices.

Part of the challenge comes from the fact that there are many home automation systems and standards out there. To date, they've largely been developed by individual companies working on proprietary and incompatible technologies. That means we are saddled with limited functional scope, little to no compatibility, vendor lock-in and fairly high prices. The consumer wants to connect everything to everything as simply and cheaply as possible, but for now they must choose between several incompatible platforms.  Much like the VHS versus BetaMax battle of the 80s, this is going to have to be sorted out.

On their own, these IoT-enabled home devices can be useful, but to get them to work in an integrated “smart” home they must be supported by another essential component –a provisioning and management system.

Management

The current emerging platforms for IoT-enabled home devices include HomeKit from Apple, Brillo from Google, SmartThings from Samsung, Canopy from ADT and Wink, a platform from a startup that thankfully is working to unite multiple standards. There is also OpenHub, an open source project that's likely to connect IoT-enabled home devices to some or all of these platforms as well as provide Bluetooth and plain old WiFi for devices that don’t support these protocols natively.