It’s All About “U”

By Shomit Ghose, Guest Author

It’s All About “U” – The future of computing technology is all about “ubiquity”: ubiquitous computers, ubiquitous networking, and ubiquitous data. Computing platforms and applications have evolved from centralized, batch-oriented mainframes, to PCs, to the-device-formerly-known-as-the-cell-phone. The latest evolutionary steps are promising even more ubiquity: several years ago, the U.S. Department of Defense funded the development of wireless sensor technology to be used in battlefield intelligence applications. The DoD’s vision was to use tiny, cheap, wirelessly-networked, and highly ubiquitous computers to remotely collect and process data on hostile activity – the so-called “smart dust” project. And we aren’t talking about mere RFID tags here but ad-hoc networks of many tiny, fully-functional (albeit underpowered!) computers with networking based on short-range radios.

The wireless sensor platforms developed from this research have emerged from defense and security applications and are now starting to find commercial application in a range of markets from precision agriculture, to supply chains, to industrial monitoring; the edge of the traditional computer network has been extended from the desktop in the office to the item-level or boxtop-level “smart edge” in the field. This is the advent of a new computing paradigm that is being labeled “The Internet of Things”. In a few short years, these “thing” constituents of the Internet are projected to far outnumber the humans.

We now find ourselves going from a world where computing has been performed by a countable number of powerful computers in a fixed network using relatively static data stored in a database, to a world where large numbers of tiny computers are everywhere in the physical environment – embedded in the smallest of items – with networks that are fluid and constantly changing, and vast quantities of streaming data that must be acted upon, using standard SQL models, before it’s ever stored. This requires an entirely new class of supporting software infrastructure and applications, and gives rise to an entirely new generation of startup and investing opportunities

Kissing Your Apps Goodbye? – Though it has become de rigueur to pronounce the demise of enterprise software, the ubiquitous computing model of The Internet of Things is destined to rejuvenate the market. With the spread of networked computation to the item-level, we now face a future where, for example, highly traditional applications such as CRM and ERP can be practiced at their most granular and real-time levels. Imagine an ERP system where a shipping crate on a truck on the highway can detect that the fruit it contains has spoiled and automatically orders a replacement crate. Imagine a CRM system for a manufacturer of industrial machinery that can detect that a component at a customer site will fail in another week and can preemptively schedule a repair. Already today the integrity of oil pipelines is being monitored by networks of wireless sensors. One large oil firm has used wireless sensors to cheaply and proactively monitor the health – by monitoring vibrations – of dozens of oil tanker engine components. Ubiquitous computing applications such as these are already at the forefront of deployment.

What Else Can U Be? – Just as the availability of CPU cycles is becoming ever more ubiquitous, networking too is on the same path. With the advent of technologies such as WiFi, and in time WiMax and WiBro, network bandwidth is becoming ubiquitous and cheap (if not free). What are the implications on building networking infrastructure in an environment where little or nothing will be paid for access to the bandwidth? What business models will be fueled by the availability of cheap/free and ubiquitous networks? The “u” generation is guaranteed to fuel startup opportunities across the board in every sector of high technology.