S

ensors are everywhere and connectivity is now practically ubiquitous. The internet of things (IoT) is the key driver of digital transformation, so what is on the horizon for 2016?

Sensors are everywhere — in heating systems, pedometers, cars, pumps, traffic lights, engines. This is partly because the price of these tiny electronic transmitters has fallen by 80 percent over the past four years.

Connectivity is practically ubiquitous, and companies are expecting increasingly big things from the big data these sensors generate.

In ASEAN, the IoT trend has also been witnessing tremendous growth. Zaf Coelho, project director of the Asia IoT Business Platform highlighted how Southeast Asia offers tremendous opportunities in terms of the scale and usage of IoT/M2M solutions, leveraging technology through key enterprise and policy decision-making, leading the entire ASEAN region’s transformation.

Indonesia’s capital and its third largest city by population, namely Jakarta and Bandung, West Java, already had aspirations of becoming smart cities by 2018.

In line with this aspiration, the Jakarta administration launched a “Jakarta Smart City” app overseeing the integration of Qlue, the administration’s crowd-sourcing website; Waze, a 24-hour mobile traffic information and chat platform, and CROP, the application used by officials to immediately acknowledge and respond to public complaints.

The Smart Lighting initiative will also see Jakarta replace its current road lighting system with the aid of more advanced technologies.

Our society today must understand what factors and issues will affect IoT in the near future. Here I list a few of the developments that would have a major impact on the IoT in 2016.

The IoT platforms will not “just” be proprietary. A central IoT platform such as the SAP HANA Cloud Platform does not have to be constantly reinvented.

User, security, and storage concepts, for example, can be used again and again. This is no longer just about gathering data — it is also about connecting it intelligently.

To give developers more technology options, SAP for instance now supports the Cloud Foundry, a cloud-based open-source development platform that was originally designed by a team from Google.

With Cloud Foundry, SAP as an example has noted that much better adoption is secured, than with proprietary SAP technology alone.

Sustainable platforms must be capable of understanding and processing a wide range of sensor data from different industries.

Smart networks will go mainstream. What manufacturers need for today is technology to manage information about machines and equipment centrally, gain insights into operating data and make this information available to partners.  

This will then free up the machine owners to concentrate on their core business, while the manufacturer determines what maintenance is needed on a specific machine and procures parts from a single source.

Smarter than ever — the selection of big data. Filtering data, aggregating and analyzing it, and only
then writing it to a database is one of the most important tasks that lies ahead.

As such, the demands on data selection will increase. A smart data-streaming option can be deployed on premises and we can expect similar services to be available on cloud soon.

Software with a fun factor. Anyone who has ever uploaded personal fitness data to an online platform knows that you can track your own performance over the course of weeks and months.

Thanks to a digital platform, sport gains an extra fun factor. This will become increasingly important in the IoT environment, too.

Standard services make IoT capabilities easier to deploy. Customers do not want to have to do a whole lot of additional programming to take advantage of IoT capabilities. Because processes and scenarios repeat themselves, standardized modules and services that already exist can be quickly re-deployed.

Over the next year, these standard modules and services will be provided as part of SAP’s IoT application services. The goal eventually is to enable companies to develop their own services on the basis of their IoT platform, with less and less programming work required.

Ultimately, this constant addition of new services will play a part in platforms becoming ever more powerful.

The existence of the IoT is not only beneficial for the business world, but also for the welfare of modern Indonesian society.

In developing countries such as Indonesia, the IoT will help health institutions in providing a fast and modern service to patients.

The use of the IoT will greatly assist Indonesia’s health sector in becoming cost-efficient for all sections of the community. Therefore, it is necessary to study how the application of the IoT in the health sector can improve the efficiency of services for the Health Care and Social Security Agency (BPJS Kesehatan).

A clear example of this can be found at the BPJS itself where the director of information technology has explained the challenges faced by the organization in dealing with the large number of BPJS participants.

These center around membership, premiums and on-time payment of claims in less than 15 days. The management realized that to achieve all these aspirations, proper technology solutions were
needed.

With the number of registered BPJS participants consisting of as much as 64 percent of Indonesia’s population, the IoT will be the determining factor in the success and future of the healthcare industry in Indonesia.
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The author is the vice president and managing director for SAP Indonesia. She is responsible for the strategies of business development and operations for SAP in Indonesia.