A rising trend in adoption of smart mobile devices coupled with the Indian government’s focus on smart cities will further boost the growth of IoT in India. Murli Mohan, Director and General Manager, Dell Software Group, shares with Express Computer, his perspective on the IoT market in India, and the growth opportunities for his firm.
Some edited excerpts:
1. What in your view are some of the biggest growth drivers for IoT in India?
The end user will drive the next wave of growth of IoT in the Indian market. Let me elaborate a bit on this; today the trends in mobility, smart homes and smart devices govern the way we live and work. Gartner recently forecasted that there will be 6.4 billion connected “things” used worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015, and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020. Imagine the kind of data generated by so many interconnected devices.
While the focus so far has been on consumer products, applications are gradually shifting to the enterprise space, where we will see increased IoT adoption. Many verticals such as manufacturing, automotive, IT/ITeS, consumer, agriculture already have presence in the entire IoT scheme of things. Enterprise adoption of IoT will drive trends towards big data analytics in real time and interoperability of machines. Along with these factors the Indian govt’s focus on developing smart cities and e-governance will further boost the growth of IoT in India.
2. How do you see the market opportunity for IoT with respect to your clients in India?
We have many customers across different verticals in India and I strongly believe that each one of them have the opportunity to optimize IoT for market competitiveness. For instance, Chitale Dairy has successfully redefined dairy farming into a high-tech industry by automating its entire milk production and monitoring processes. The feeding and breeding of animals is now monitored by computers and by automating the collection of data from each farm, they have improved animal health, leading to increased milk yield per animal. This was possible by tagging every animal with a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag that, when scanned, transmits unique information on each cow and buffalo back to the data center.
In Chitale Dairy’s case, the use of IoT is simple yet powerful considering the fact that they have managed to increase their yield and hence their market as well. Similarly, other players in various verticals have a significant market opportunity and can make the most of IoT.
3. From your product/ solutions portfolio, can you describe some of the key solutions of your firm in the IoT space and explain how it helps enterprises?
At Dell, we have cut through the hype of IoT with a practical approach that help our customers leverage existing equipment and data to make the most of current technology investments. Dell customers can take advantage of analytics scenarios that span gateways, datacenter and cloud, leading to analytics-driven action. Specifically for IoT, we have the Dell Edge Gateway 5000 Series which is designed to aggregate, secure and relay data from diverse sensors and equipment. The device has the capacity to perform local analytics so only meaningful information is sent to the next tier, which could be another gateway, the data center or the cloud. This solution can help enterprises in minimizing the consumption of expensive network bandwidth and reduces overall solution latency.
4. Can you give us some examples of your clients in India who are using your IoT solutions?
If we consider Chitale Dairy again, their entire operations are conducted over the company’s network, from communications to managing their distribution channels. With technology running every aspect of Chitale Dairy’s business, they wanted the flexibility to scale to a 10-gigabit Ethernet network to ensure fast communications between all stakeholders. With existing switches in place, interoperability was required. After considering several solutions the company migrated to Dell Networking Ethernet top-of-rack switches with redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and fans.
As a result Dell Networking eliminated delays that impeded Chitale Dairy’s daily delivery schedule for fresh milk products. Network virtualization on Dell meant complete protection on an open platform, while delivering 10-gigabit network speeds. In IoT the kind of support we offer to our customers depends on the requirement of the market. If we consider the Indian market where IoT is just picking up, we are supporting our customer from an enterprise perspective and enabling our customers to maximise the benefits of using IoT based solutions for their business needs.
5. Your view on the future outlook for IoT in India
It is clear that India’s robust domestic market, both enterprise and consumer, will contribute significantly to the potential for IoT in the country. From a technology perspective, there will be a significant push towards interoperability and trends towards making sense of data quickly and efficiently through edge computing and big data analytics. The growth of data along with huge number of interconnected devices will also mean that there will be significant focus on development of security solutions for IoT. Administrators across different verticals will focus on keeping their data safe while managing through the minefield of interconnected devices.
