Businesses are embracing the Internet of Things (IoT), which enables them to get closer to their users by delivering services right to the edge—think sensors on a remote oil pipeline, or the smartwatch or fitness band on your wrist—for a better customer experience. The number of IoT-connected devices worldwide is expected to nearly triple in just six years, from 26.66 billion today to 75.44 billion in 2025.
This explosive growth will continue for the foreseeable future, too, as surging demand for connected-IoT hardware expands across consumer, business and industrial markets. According to ReportLinker, a French market research firm, Europe by 2020 will be the global leader in terms of IoT usage, accounting for 36% of all connections, followed by the Americas at 28%.
Why IoT is Complex
Although the Internet of Things delivers tangible benefits, the ROI, integration and management of this burgeoning ecosystem is not only complex, it also can be a barrier to market growth, services adoption and organisational change. Edge devices contain a wealth of information, but too often they’re seen as a black box and are underutilized. When performance problems occur, businesses lack diagnostic tools for real-time visibility. And while edge devices deliver a critical avenue of interaction with customers, they often require a large initial investment and a lengthy, uncertain ROI.
Why AppDynamics for IoT
Cisco and AppDynamics understand the IoT is a crucial strategy for many businesses. We seek to help drive your digital transformation efforts by demystifying IoT services. Digital transformation is about simplifying the customer experience, an effort involving significant investment and greater backend complexity and distribution, including more dependencies and an exponential impact on scale. The question therein lies: How can this complexity be understood?
Here’s where AppDynamics helps some of the world’s largest enterprises understand their customer interaction. The only constant is what customers do. Every touch or click sets off a transaction with the potential to initiate thousands of lines of code, and trigger hundreds of API calls that connect tens of hundreds of interconnected microservices, each residing in a different location and leveraging multiple container-clustering technologies.
With AppDynamics, you can unlock the value of IoT by following the Business Journey from start to finish, understanding the behaviour of embedded application devices, networks and users. By harnessing real-time visibility and end-to-end monitoring for edge devices and gateways with business correlation, you can better understand device performance, communication, and interaction—both in capturing data and diagnosing how business objectives are impacted.
End-to-end visibility, from IoT device to backend.
Typical IoT use cases include:
- Edge Performance Monitoring: Monitor the health of devices with critical metrics such as errors, network requests and usage, whilst correlating this data with business performance indicators.
- Device and User Segmentation: Gain insight into specific devices, platforms, data and users to ensure a consistent user experience across all segments.
- Release Validation: Obtain empirical evidence of how a software release impacts not only performance, but also the business.
- SLA Compliance: Ensure devices are compliant. Send the right data on time, consistently and to the correct endpoints.
At AppDynamics, we don’t just make the IoT comprehendible, we go one step further and correlate insights collected from IoT endpoints with business-relevant data to provide context. This helps organisations:
- Drive down operational cost
- Reduce downtime by offering remote diagnostics
- Increase operational efficiency and insight by knowing what IoT devices are in use, and what data is being sent, how often, and when
Why IoT is Important Now
The accurate market perception of IoT is that it’s a necessity—a key component of digital transformation. Whether a business is looking to reimagine the ways it interacts with customers, or is moving from one business model to another, the IoT is usually a core part of that transformation. Whether a customer is an automobile manufacturer, a bank, a credit card processing intermediary, an industrial robot manufacturer, or a retailer with POS devices, the IoT is present.
Every business is looking at how the IoT can be leveraged, introducing new levels of complexity to an already intricate ecosystem. It’s estimated that 50 billion devices will be online by 2020, whereas only 0.06% of all devices are actually being leveraged as connected devices, according to Cisco. With the Internet of Things at the epicentre of most organisations’ digital transformation strategies, the IoT represents an enormous investment from the business, with equal levels of opportunity.
Bain predicts the IoT market will more than double between 2017 and 2021—from $235B to a staggering $520B. There are, of course, barriers that limit the adoption of IoT analytics solutions, including market competition. But putting that to one side, all vendors will experience similar limitations with IoT adoption, including security issues, integration with existing technology, and uncertain ROI, Bain forecasts.
AppDynamics offers many advantages here. Consider return on IoT investment: AppDynamics’ BusinessIQ makes this determination far easier by correlating the performance of IoT services with business performance indicators, carving a realistic route to ROI.
When it comes to IT/OT integration and security, Cisco provides best-in-class solutions. And as part of Cisco’s portfolio, AppDynamics can deliver a cohesive IoT solution to our joint customer base.
Learn how AppDynamics IoT monitoring can provide real-time visibility, diagnostics, and analytics for your connected device applications.
