Integration has been treated as a kind of old fashioned IT jargon of connecting your old legacy systems with set of other enterprise level applications and services. Most people might be thinking about it as a day in day out kind of thing which you must have but not "Cool" as other stuff like "IOT". Integration solution providers made this a bit "Cool" by providing connectors to most of the web APIs provided by 3rd party companies.
But the real deal is Internet Of Things. Whether you like it or not, It is here and it is taking over the IT industry. So, what the heck Integration has to do with this new IT jargon of IOT? Well, it has to do everything to make IOT a success. Which means that, there will not be any IOT, without the Integration.
If you are an Integration engineer, you know how hard it is to connect 4 or 5 different systems with each other. But you have done it and you feel much satisfied once you have done that. But the time has come for a greater challenge. Here are the challenged we might face when building the Internet Of Everything (IOE).
1) Greater heterogeneity of vendors and devices - If you think about a simplest of example, mobile phone. You have 1000s of different vendors manufacturing mobile phones. Even though we have few main operating systems, we cannot expect that for the "Things" which might be serving 1000s of different needs of mankind.
2) Lack of standards in the hardware world - Software industry has been there for some time and it is somehow connected with the invent of Internet and we have been able to come up with standards. But hardware industry is not connected up until IOT came up and there has not been much thinking around standards. Biggest challenge would be to standardized different consumer devices such that they can talk with each other.
3) Limitless possibilities of products - How many consumer electronic devices do you have in your home? I bet that could be around 50. If we take your neighbor, he or she might be having more than 5 devices which you don't have. If we count like this, we might end up numbers rather than devices. So the possibilities are limitless and so as the challenge of integration.
4) No common Alliance or Body - It is true that, all of the big companies are investing billions for building their own IOT solutions. But there is no such common controlling body or an alliance kind of thing at the moment.
Above are only few challenges we might face in building a real Internet Of Things. Truth to be said, there is no one building the IOT as in the scale of Internet. All big organizations are trying to build their own flavors of the IOT which is only a part of the big picture. We need to think about the big picture and build Integration solutions to cope with these challenges when it comes to building the real IOT.
So, Integration folks, keep your eyes open and prepare for the greatest challenge you will ever face !!!
