1AR – AT – Profit Motive

Fulton 22 – VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER, WIRELESS AND SENSING PRODUCTS GROUP, SEMTECH [Alistair, “The Critical Role of Internet of Things (IoT) in Fighting Climate Change and Decarbonizing Our Planet,” , DKP]

For these industries, we must fall back on the profit motive. The profit motive got us here in the first place by driving increases in global production, but the same quest for economic returns may also be the best way to help us change course. Why? The key to driving more profit from existing processes is to increase efficiency. The same efficiency improvements also reduce emissions.

While the motivation is strong, until recently, enterprises have lacked the cost-effective and easy-to-use tools needed to identify where processes fail, where waste or pollution occurs and where the opportunities to drive greater efficiency exist.

The Internet of Things (IoT) Is Key to Aligning Economic and Environmental Goals.

Filling this gap is the goal of the IoT — enabling the system-level data analytics needed to support producers on the quest for efficiency and profit. These solutions answer the question of how to produce more from less by helping enterprise customers identify waste, develop process improvements and monitor efficiency gains.

By instrumenting legacy processes to enable improvements that drive both economic and environmental returns, we can create a virtuous circle where investments in IoT solutions generate a rapid ROI, justifying further deployment.

Why haven't IoT solutions been more widely adopted? Because IoT solutions used to be complex and expensive to deploy. However, that has changed.

IoT For All.

IoT solutions rely on the collection of operational data across entire processes or supply chains. The integration of that data with other enterprise data and analysis derives actionable insights. Historically, the cost and complexity of developing IoT solutions slowed adoption, reducing their impact on climate change. The cost of solution development combined with the operational complexity of deploying non-wireless IoT sensors (requiring power and LAN connectivity) is the biggest challenge.

The good news is that the rapid growth in IoT cloud platforms like AWS IoT, Azure IoT and others has addressed important parts of this equation by providing easy-to-use, cost-effective ways to ingest and manage large IoT datasets, leaving the challenge of deploying and connecting low-cost sensor networks in legacy environments to solve. Given the evolution of now widely available low-cost/low-power wireless to connect cheaper, battery-powered sensors using technologies like LPWAN and cellular IoT, there are secure and cost-effective ways to collect IoT data and simplify retrofit.