The attack of the robot grocers

The Cambridge Wireless Connected Devices SIG meeting sparked wide-ranging discussion on provocative topics; from the tussle between low power wide area (LPWA) players and the cellular industry to robot swarms. Sam Fenwick reports

Emil Berthelsen, principal analyst at Machina Research, kicked off the event with a high-level focus on the IoT industry. He notes that in the case of enterprise IoT "one of the key things people are beginning to realise" is that it is not a greenfield market "90 per cent of the time enterprise IoT involves connecting to existing ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems and other similar systems. He adds that integration is a key challenge, "especially as very few existing ERP systems are ready for real-time information".

Berthelsen says that what he's seeing right now is more a subnet of things than an Internet of Things, because data sharing takes place between clusters of organisations in a piecemeal fashion rather than at a large scale with data being openly shared. A powerful incentive for data sharing among enterprises is that in many cases it's a win-win. He gives the airline industry as an example, as it benefits from the sharing of schedules, seat availability, and so on.