IT services and solutions provider Hitachi considers Internet of Things (IoT) as the core to its growth and for serving the customers better, says Ravi Chalaka, Vice President of Global IoT marketing , Hitachi Insight Group in conversation with Elets News Network (ENN).
Please give us an overview of Hitachi’s IoT division.
Hitachi’s IoT division’s purpose is to work with multiple Hitachi companies, technology partners and system integrators to develop IoT solutions. These solutions will target different markets like commercial IoT for banks and hospitals, industrial IoT for factories, mining and agriculture, smart cities and the energy industry.
The Government of India has started digital smart cities programme. How important a role will IoT play in this space ?
Vice President of Global IoT marketing
Hitachi Insight Group
In order to run anything intelligently, you need to gather data, and the more data you can get from devices and not just people, will help automate a lot of processes. For example, we are solving processes for water efficiency, waste management and energy field or traffic. IoT sensors or IoT cameras can provide data to help make better decisions to make a smart city. That is why IoT is the core to the running of a smart city.
You need IoT sensors in every machine to gather the data and predict what’s going to happen.
What kind of challenges are you facing in implementing IoT technologies ?
IoT is in its infancy stage. This is where internet was 20 years ago or computers were 50 years ago. There are no standards, deployments are not generalised and every environment is different. So we are going through the initial phase of trying, deploying and getting it to work. There are a lot of success stories and now we need to take it to a mature marketplace in the next five years.
How IoT is changing the technology landscape world over ?
In every industry, IoT will have significant effects. Let’s take an example of hospitals, you want better patient outcomes. Now you can not only analyse the data of a patient through activity trackers like Fitbit devices, but through all machinery that keep track a patient’s health like a scanner to ensure everything runs efficiently with less downtime and the patient outcomes are better.
The same is for energy. You have lots of renewable energy like solar and wind energy. To predict how much energy you are going to produce efficiently you need IoT sensors in every machine to gather the data and predict what’s going to happen.
What is the future of IoT in your prospect ?
For Hitachi, IoT is going to become the core of our growth and for serving customers better. Gone are the days when you build a machine, you sell it and you service it. Today, customers want us to implement sensors, track the data not only on the particular machine but a fleet of machines and help them make better decisions to run their businesses and machines in a more efficient manner. Take the example of a bullet train. A bullet train has 4,000 sensors – We look at how the doors, the brakes, the transmissions are performing. We do predict maintenance and try and ensure it runs efficiently and smoothly through cost effective IoT sensors.