Big Data Analytics (BDA) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are some of the most exciting and rapidly-changing phenomena in the world.  These two fields are closely connected, since IoT devices generate (and stream) lots of data which typically requires BDA to create actionable insights and, in many cases, control these devices. Let’s take a look at what interesting happened in these two areas last week.

How are different counties using the IoT?

Accenture Digital provided the ranking of different countries in terms taking advantage of the Internet of Things.  Accenture attempted to measure “the extent to which countries have woven the IoT into their economic fabric as a country’s “national absorptive capacity” (NAC).” Their ranking of major economies is shown below.

To understand this NAS index: “a country with a NAC score of 100 would be the top performer on each of the 55 indicators compared to the other study countries. Overall, the results show that no one country has achieved this level of NAC. In other words, every country has work to do.”

Fog Computing

Fog computing (also known as edge computing) provides a way to gather and process data at local computing devices, as opposed to the Cloud or a remote data center near those devices. In these cases, sensors and other connected devices send data to a nearby edge computing device. This computing device can be a gateway, such as a switch or router, that processes and analyzes the  data.  Or an IoT computer, like this HP EdgeLine server.

This is how fog (edge) computing operates:

Dell, for example, just announced this mini-datacenter to support fog computing, and to be placed “at the edge” to preserve core network capacity by putting compute and content out where their users are.

Estimating Future Numbers of IoT Devices

This plot from BI Intelligence shows how the growth in device numbers will occur in the next 5 years. Notice that the numbers in the “Home” segment are smaller than those in both “Government/Infrastructure” and “Enterprise”.  Apparently, businesses “see three ways the IoT can improve their bottom line by 1) lowering operating costs; 2) increasing productivity; and 3) expanding to new markets or developing new product offerings.”