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502175 IoT Advances That Will Revolutionize Small and Branch OfficesBy Don MacVittie

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Will Revolutionize Small and Branch OfficesBy Don MacVittie

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Table of Contents

5 IoT Advances SMBs Can Use Today . . . . . . . 5Honorable Mention: Demand Response . . . . . . 9IoT Bandwidth Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

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DON MACVITTIE is founder of Ingrained Technology, a technical advocacy, technical writing and software development consultancy. He has experience in application development, architecture, infrastructure, technical writing, DevOps and IT management. MacVittie holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Northern Michigan University and a master’s degree in computer science from Nova Southeastern University.

About the Author

linkedin.com/in/donmacvittie @dmacvittie

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5 IoT Advances That Will Revolutionize Small and Branch Offices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is not just a consumer or specialized vertical play. The Boston Consulting Group’s recent analysis shows the business-to-business IoT opportunity growing to $267 billion by 2020. Now, this includes all spending, from devices to connectivity, and is a global forecast. Still, even if the numbers are off by a large factor, the market growth trajectory clearly shows that channel partners, especially those in the business of selling the bandwidth that all IoT solutions demand, should begin to develop IoT offerings. Your customers will want them and you’ll enjoy the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) streams they create.

The stumbling block for most partners is that the generic functionality useful to most customers — as opposed to point solutions that solve a very specific problem for a very specific industry — is still hard to conceptualize. But make no mistake, the possibilities are there. Even for carpeted-

Specialized Services, Sweet MarginsIf you serve verticals, take a look at what IoT can do for those customers. Some examples:

■ In the hospitality industry, a food spoilage monitoring service could text a restaurant owner if a freezer’s temperature drops below a certain threshold or a predictive maintenance service would enable a malfunctioning air conditioner to call for repair before a guest experiences any discomfort.

■ Health care researchers have developed electrodes that can be mounted on IoT devices to measure biosignals such as brain waves and electrocardiograms without additional analysis and measurement equipment, and without interfering with or restricting patient activity. For HIPAA compliance, PCs connected to patient records can restrict accessibility by switching on and off depending on their proximity to an employee badge.

■ Retail customers may be intrigued by connected vending machines that accept mobile wallets and allow for new advertising and marketing programs that can boost customer intimacy.

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office SMBs, you can demonstrate ROI on IoT services. And often, higher-end consumer security and smart home technologies — from video doorbells to Amazon Alexa — can be bundled into an offering that will be light-years ahead of what small and branch offices now enjoy.

451 Research estimates that while SMB adoption of IoT is in its very earliest stages, with most of the growth ahead of us, interest is there now. All a customer needs is the right idea delivered by a trusted adviser who knows their business and can do some basic integration work. Let’s take a look at sample use cases, then talk about added services and the next steps.

IoT Initiative - Stage of Deployment

Enterprise

SMB

Public Sector

In Short-Term Plan to Deploy (<6 Months Out)In Long-Term Plan to Deploy (6+ Months Out)

Currently Deployed

Source: Voice of the Enterprise, Datacenters Q4 2015

23%

8%

15%

8%

26%

17%

4%

4%

6%

12%

5 IoT Advances SMBs Can Use TodayThere are a lot of products and processes out there that can help offices —

including smaller offices — increase productivity. The market is there, too: Small business owners are approaching 2017 with economic optimism and plans for growth, according to a survey from small business financing company Guidant Financial. Among more than 1,000 small businesses from all 50 states, 53 percent of respondents are looking to grow their current business operations. And, year over year, Guidant saw an 84 percent increase in entrepreneurs ages 30 to 39. This bodes well for selling new technology as the answer to old problems.

Environment controls: IoT can help customers control everything from artificial lighting to temperature to automatically letting more sunshine into the office. The Phillips Hue system, for example, offers lighting that is infinitely customizable, down

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to each employee workspace. The system is controllable from an app on a mobile phone and requires little more installation than screwing in light bulbs and configuring a simple hub. Another smart lighting system, NuLEDs, uses IoT and Power over Ethernet (PoE) to connect lighting installations to the internet. Light fixtures get IP addresses and are fully programmable.

There are other providers of smart lights for offices, and similar devices to control temperature, the position of window shades and even power flowing to devices — though all of those have a larger implementation expense than lighting solutions.

Phillips and other smart lighting suppliers have channel programs for installation and support. Partners can also help with analytics and connecting smart systems back to the cloud.

Making the sale involves both savings on energy use, which we’ll discuss, and the potential to impress end customers. For example, LED lighting and IoT have merged to create an entire market that specializes in mood lighting. A prospect can walk into an environment that has been customized throughout to impress. Imagine, for example, entering a meeting with a prospective vendor and the room is lit in your organization’s colors, a monitor has your logo up and a digital sign is welcoming your team. This type of immersion sales/marketing can have an influence; at the very least, it shows that a firm is up on the latest advances.

Check out this setup in the offices of distributor Avant Communications.

Reasons Businesses Are Adopting IoT SolutionsImproving quality of service or product

Improving productivity of workforce

Increasing reliability of operations

Increasing asset productivity

Reducing cost of materials or waste

Accessing new customers

Increasing customer satisfaction to reduce churn and support costs, gain revenue

Insights for new products and services or cost efficiences

Faster time to market, lower development costs

Reducing risk of theft or other loss

Transitioning to services offerings

Linking price to business outcomes

Source: Bain IoT Customer Survey 2016

23%

33%

47%

44%

18%

34%

22%

16%

32%

26%

35%

37%

45%

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Automated welcome assistant: With a few industry-specific exceptions, it has become relatively rare for smaller offices to have an employee dedicated to reception. That creates the quandary of helping visitors understand what to do when they enter an office and alerting staff when an unplanned visitor arrives.

A combination of old technology with new IoT functionality can help. Consider configuring IoT door alarms to alert employees who are otherwise

engaged, while an automated touch-screen-based reception system gives a customer’s small office a presence that is both efficient and miles better than a cardboard sign.

For stand-alone offices, IoT-enabled commercial-grade cloud-based access management systems, like RemoteLocks, can enable local or remote control of Wi-Fi-connected locks. That product’s maker, LockState, has a reseller program and says the Consumer Technology Association predicts the global smart door lock market will grow to $3.7 billion by 2019.

Meanwhile, an automated receptionist can go beyond simply routing calls. Partners could help customers set up preprogrammed information aimed at helping visitors help themselves. Perhaps a directory with a phone next to a monitor, perhaps an interactive smartboard with a list of employees or events with associated room numbers, or just simple message like, “Welcome. Someone will be with you shortly.”

Some customers might even be interested in a robot customer service agent. Last summer, Lowe’s debuted “LoweBot” autonomous retail service robots (NAVii systems supplied by Fellow Robots) in 11 stores throughout the San Francisco area. We can even imagine setting up an Amazon Echo and programming Alexa to make guests feel comfortable — because those visitors may just become high-volume customers in the future.

Point of sale (PoS) upgrades: Businesses exist to take in revenue. Empowering your customers to accept payment in a variety of forms is a big deal. Cloud-based services like Square offer the ability to take credit or debit cards (and more recently, electronic payment services like Apple Pay) on the fly from a mobile device. For a large cross section of businesses, this is a great advantage. The expanded universe of software and services built up around the original idea of the Square device offers innovative ways to increase revenue or reduce operational expenses.

Of course, there is overhead — a per-transaction fee plus the infrastructure costs. But in many cases, you can reduce operational costs or replace outdated, insecure and very possibly noncompliant point-of-sale systems, which can save customers more than just money. More than half of 3,773 IT and security practitioners surveyed for a Global Study on Payment Data Security  report said their companies had one or more breaches involving payment data — in fact, they’ve been hit, on average, four times in the past two years. Many don’t believe or “are unsure” if their companies’ existing security protocols are capable of supporting new payment methods, and fully 74 percent admit their companies are either not PCI DSS compliant or are only partially compliant. Breaches bring reputational cost, and partners can help here.

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Upping the game with IoT, check out the Kaa open-source platform, which is tailored for retail and has a partner ecosystem. Kaa might be overkill for businesses with no need to, for example, track goods with RFID tags, use Bluetooth beacons to connect with customers’ mobile devices or set up digital signage. However, there is support for mobile payment solutions and customer preference analytics, and partners can build a commercial product on top of the free platform under the Apache license.

Internet of Things Top Challenges

Source: Janco Associates Inc.

3%6%

2%

38%

28%

9%

9%

7%

Other

Security Threats

Data Privacy

Compliance Requirements

External Attacks

BYOD and User Department Devices

Third-Party Data Requests

Access Management

Physical security systems: For most small offices, security is not separately budgeted. Maybe it’s part of a building lease or there is a monitoring service if the office is stand-alone or in a less secure part of town. But for the most part, security for branch locations has not been a business opportunity for the channel. The IoT is introducing innovations that could change that and allow security to become a part of standard operating procedure for any business.

“Conscious cameras,” like those from Qualcomm, that can automatically monitor images are getting a lot of attention. In most cases, some data examination is done at the device with edge analytics. If an anomaly is detected, such as an individual loitering or entering an office after hours, data can be sent to the cloud for further analysis and authorities or an administrator can be alerted and can tap into the feed directly from a mobile device.

For remote offices where extra security is needed, partners might recommend a video doorbell such as those by Ring. The company’s Pro model offers 1080p HD video, two-way audio and customizable motion sensors.

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The combination of increasingly sophisticated devices can fortify security without relying upon a service or employees to remember things like locking doors or reviewing recordings. And features such as smartphone remote-control lighting that enables an employee headed to the office in the dark to light things up before arriving, enhances security at a relatively small entry point.

Self-monitoring systems: Remote offices have always struggled with IT systems management. If the servers running applications required by the remote office are kept on-site, IT staff or a partner needs to stay on top of patching, updates, backups and physical security, among other issues. If servers are remote, either in the cloud or at a colocation site or main data center, then connectivity must be 100 percent. Any downtime and the business suffers a loss of revenue.

The IoT is introducing a selection of self-monitoring systems that are local to the branch office but are managed remotely, an incremental improvement over previous remote management. Some are even self-healing.

Automated systems managers like those from Kaseya or Zenoss can reboot or reconfigure servers that are having issues in an attempt to bring them back up to fully functioning status, and raise alerts if this fails to resolve problems.

The IoT portion of this process is in data collection and aggregation, and it is advancing rapidly. For servers, this is truly an incremental change that one could argue is not IoT. But for things like VoIP devices, switches, temperature controls and automated locks, data collection, aggregation and analysis on the edge is new territory that can improve the office environment without increasing — and often reducing — demands on IT.

Honorable Mention: Demand ResponseSmart meters give customers the ability to intelligently use electricity to get reduced

rates from utilities; an example is reducing hot water temperature at times of high energy use. While this technology will definitely find its way into offices everywhere, it provides little opportunity for the channel due to the deep involvement of the utilities themselves in installing and configuring the systems. Still, it makes sense to help customers understand the demand response programs at their power suppliers.

IoT Bandwidth ImplicationsThe items we’re discussing here are not tied together by one underlying architectural

theme, and that is by design. Our goal is to provide a sampling of how you can delight small- and branch-office customers even at these very early stages of the IoT phenomenon.

But there is a commonality running through our discussion: The need for redundant connectivity.

Beware ZombiesOne nightmare scenario is that a

customer’s IoT devices become part of a DDoS attack like the one that recently took down sites including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, PayPal and Airbnb as well as companies up and down the East Coast.

The IoT Security Foundation and OWASP Internet of Things Project are good places to start learning about how to protect all those snazzy new solutions.

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Both self-monitoring systems and PoS upgrades will require infrastructure and bandwidth investments. For most small offices, consulting expertise for both technology and security issues also will be required. The nature of self-healing systems is that, when all else fails, a specialist is able to log into the systems and determine what has gone so wrong that auto-recovery is impossible. This implies redundant internet connections so that if the network is causing the failure, remote management is not automatically disabled.

PoS upgrades assume the ability to contact the host at any time to process payments, so while always-on internet is not strictly required, the closer an office can get, the more cost-effective the solution will be. Physical security systems also

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need a robust connection — controlling lighting from a smartphone assumes the device can reach control systems, while monitoring security cameras for motion does no good if the system can’t alert on an anomaly.

Lighting solutions do not generally require infrastructure or consulting support, but all of the remaining solutions would require some level of expert services to implement. Automated reception is an easy system to utilize, once installed, but requires someone knowledgeable in hardware and the office network to initially implement, for example.

And of course, any data sent to the cloud — for security or systems management — will need storage space and a retention policy, all things that customers will need help arranging

The focus for service providers should be: � Redundant internet connections. Since they’ll be needed for some of the more powerful solutions above, it is a solid place to look for opportunity.

� Systems management. Someone will need to be the final call when self-repairing systems can’t repair. (A failed hard disk in the most obvious case, but there are some software problems that reboots won’t solve.)

� Support for services like Square. These solutions, like most IoT offerings, involve both hardware and software. Where there is either of those, things go wrong. Where there are both, they go wrong more often. Small offices are not generally tech hot spots, so a partner will need to be available to address problems.

� Server-side systems. Any item in the above list that requires remote access or remote processing also requires internet-based server support, be that in the cloud or a secured data center. Those contracts will go to someone; it may as well be to those providing access and who presumably have the lowest-latency server connections available.

� Edge computing. Providing edge computing expertise for large organizations with a geographically dispersed set of small offices (insurance, for example) is a lucrative service.