AWS Insights from IoT World 2019

At IoT World Santa Clara, over 12,000 IoT leaders and innovators gathered to make connections and gain insights about how to digitally transform their businesses with IoT. The AWS IoT team spent the week meeting with customers and partners, sharing insights onstage, and showcasing a variety of AWS IoT use cases in AWS’s own and partner booths on the expo floor.

The AWS IoT team was also honored to pick up the IoT World Award for “Best IoT Security Solution” for AWS IoT Device Defender, which is a testament to AWS’s commitment to its ongoing efforts to provide customers with the technology they need to keep their IoT data and devices secure.

If you were not able to make the show, read below for a quick recap and for links to view our session decks.

Key Insights

Mark Relph, the Global Head of Business Development & Strategy for AWS IoT, delivered a keynote at IoT World. In this keynote, he shared how the combination of connected devices, data, and machine learning can act as the springboard to transform operations, create new sources of revenue, and serve customers better. He shared the following insights about how businesses can transform their business with IoT.

Insight #1: Organizational Buy-In Cannot Be Underestimated

AWS’ customers tell us that while technology is important, the real key to a successful IoT project is ensuring there is support from the organization. Many IoT proof-of-concept projects ultimately fail because the business is not truly bought-in. IoT has the potential to transform the fundamentals of a business, potentially evolving the core business model (i.e. moving from selling a physical product like an engine, to selling a service or result like uptime or performance). These transformations can cause friction if the organization is not ready to change at the same pace.

Insight #2: Technology Should Be At Your Core

AWS’s most successful customers view their IoT infrastructure as critical technology. They want control over their destiny, but don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Embracing Serverless IoT allows them to quickly build IoT applications at scale that can adapt to any solution or scenario. Serverless allows experimentation, and in production ensures they pay only for the services they consume. This also means that their teams can focus on building new services and innovating for their customers.

Insight #3: Operate At The Edge – But With Modern Tools

The “edge” is an important consideration for any IoT project. There are durable reasons such has latency, unreliable connectivity, and dealing with data from industrial equipment. With software such as AWS IoT Greengrass, our customers can leverage the same tool chain at the Edge that they use in the cloud. This enables cloud developers to build for embedded systems.

Insight #4: Nothing Gets Smarter Without The Data

Data drives efficiency, and can help create new sources of revenue. Dealing with data can be difficult. Many customers generate data, but unlocking it from industrial data sources and using it for advanced analytics can be difficult. We are working with customers to help them unlock data from OPC-UA servers and historians. With that data, these customers are able to create a cycle of training data in the cloud and using the insights at the edge.

Insight #5: There Is No Compression Algorithm For Experience

Finally, our customers tell us that nothing replaces experience. They are experts in what they do, often with decades of experience in their industry. IoT augments, rather that replaces, that experience. When they look for help, they need experts that have that same depth of experience. AWS, and Amazon more broadly, has the real world experience in what it takes to build these IoT solutions at scale. AWS also brings a powerful ecosystem of partners, to help customers augment their experience and accelerate their IoT projects.

View Keynote Slides >>

View our session presentations

Aside from the keynote, we had several sessions providing a deeper dive on specific IoT use cases, solutions, and trends:

“Distributed Solar Systems: Revolutionizing Time-Series Predictive Analytics, IoT, and Machine Learning with AWS” Wale Oladehin

In this session, Wale shared how AWS customers use AWS IoT to synchronize their industrial time-series data from multiple sites to the AWS Cloud, where advanced analytics and machine learning can generate valuable insights about their business.
View Slides >>

“IoT Made Easy” Craig Williams, Principle Solutions Architect, IoT

In this session, Craig shared how AWS helps our customers around the world easily deploy IoT solutions by collecting and analyzing data using sophisticated techniques such as machine learning, taking preventative measures to secure their fleet of devices, actively monitoring devices, and deploying machine learning models onto devices.
View Slides >>

“Best Practices in IoT Architecture” Craig Williams, Principle Solutions Architect, IoT

Geared towards developers, this session shared knowledge and best practices in IoT Architecture. Craig gave a cloud agnostic overview of IoT Architecture Patterns and Anti-Patterns, shared best practices for scaling and critical message processing patterns, and insights on how to optimize your workloads with AWS IoT.
View Slides >>

What topics would you like to hear the AWS IoT team speak about at future events? Let us know in the comments!