Think East Coast telecoms, writes Guy Daniels, and the chances are you’ll come up with some of the big names in network innovation – from the industrial data canvas suburbs of Boston, through New Jersey and down to the technology corridor of northern Virginia.
Boston was once home to giants such as 3Com, Wang, Starent and DEC, centred along Route 128. At least, it used to be. Many of the telecoms vendors of the pre-IP world have long since gone, and the term ‘technology businesses’ in Boston now largely refers to the Facebook legacy of software start-ups (Facebook famously started at Harvard University). Now, about the only sizeable pure networking firm left is Acacia Communications.
New Jersey is still home to Bell Labs though, and that great research centre continues fighting the telecoms corner, although no longer affiliated with AT&T. Down in Virginia, the Dulles Technology Corridor is home to many technology firms, and was once rather optimistically called ‘the Silicon Valley of the East’. That might have been a stretch, but firms such as NeuStar, CSC and XO Communications are headquartered there.
So what does this mean for IoT? Well, the fact that so many networking firms have long since gone doesn’t mean that the culture of industrial technology has gone too. There is plenty of innovation underway in companies up and down the eastern seaboard.
What’s more, the East Coast is where some of the biggest IoT users are based. The North Eastern USA is home to some major companies across many vertical markets – from manufacturing to healthcare and financial services. Many of these firms already look to IoT to solve their problems and are prepared to deploy solutions at scale.
Symbolising the heritage of the East Coast is the Industrial Internet Consortium, based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Industrial Internet is a term coined by manufacturing giant GE that embraces the use of M2M for industry. The IIC is an open membership group formed in March 2014 by AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel with the aim of “breaking down the barriers of technology silos to support better access to big data with improved integration of the physical and digital
‘The Industrial Internet Consortium currently has 167 members from 24 countries,” says the IIC’s Julie Pike. Emphasising the importance of the region in M2M and internet development, she adds that, “members that are headquartered in the northeast of the United States hail from many industries: security, software, and healthcare to name a few”.
GE is a global leader in numerous industries and the Connecticut-based company is investing heavily in M2M and big data. As Jeff Kelly of Wikibon notes: “data created by industrial equipment such as wind turbines, jet engines and MRI machines … holds more potential business value on a size-adjusted basis than other types of big data associated with the social web, consumer internet and other sources.”
GE has already launched dozens of “Predictivity” industrial analytical applications, which CEO Jeff Immelt says could generate more than $1 billion for the company. “We are at an inflection point,” said Joe Salvo, manager of the Complex Systems Engineering Laboratory at GE Global Research. “The next wave of productivity will connect brilliant machines and people with actionable insight.”
On a smaller scale is BigBelly, a Needham, Massachusetts-based firm whose message is to “transform waste management practices and contribute to the smart cities of tomorrow”. Trash collection and recycling is a resource intensive process that costs US cities $55 billion annually. BigBelly places IoT modules within rubbish bins and recycling centres, and offers a managed services option to city authorities, allowing optimised collections, route-planning, collection statistics and analysis. The city of Philadelphia bought 210 of the company’s recycling containers in 2009 and saved $2,600 per month just by avoiding landfill charges.
Start-up firm Dog Hunter is another great example of M2M innovation. Based in the iconic Faneuil Hall building in downtown Boston, Dog Hunter is the commercial side of Linino.org – which combines the Linux OS with IoT hardware, WiFi 802.11n connectivity, OpenWRT and the P2P AllJoyn software framework. It wants to make open source WiFi home automation seamless and easy to understand for all levels of technology users, so it’s created the Linino software framework and operating system. Dog Hunter specialises in the design, development and production of Linino WiFi modules, to be used in automation control systems and sensor management.
Wyless
Founded in 2003, Wyless is an IoT managed services provider headquartered in Boston, MA, with offices around the globe. It runs a multi-carrier global wireless data network and offers management software and IoT services, to enable its customers to quickly deploy scalable and reliable IoT applications. “Our key focuses are growth of our core businesses, development of exciting new technology and above all, our customers,” explained Chris Lowery, chairman of Wyless. “Our roadmap is simple; perfection of our existing managed services offerings combined with future technology will ensure that our customers succeed in IoT.
Looking at sector-specific applications, Boston is one of the world’s leading centres for biotechnology and healthcare. Boston-based BK Medical, a specialist in ultrasound equipment, launched a year-long study to determine how their centralised standalone ultrasound systems can be integrated into multiple distributed systems. Working with IoT platform provider RTI, it’s adopted a data-centric approach to ensure that their architecture can be integrated with hospitals and healthcare providers.
