Luc Vidal Madjar for Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Hyperautomation

Speaker: Luc Vidal Madjar, Head of IoT and MVNE Solutions at BICS

Luc Vidal Madjar: Hello, Everyone, I'm Luc Vidal Madjar, Head of IoT solutions at BICS. I've been in charge of building and managing the global MVNO for IoT of BICS since we started. In this IoT technology landscape, we see hyper automation, especially in the context of digital twin as a compelling market trend for IoT in the coming years. And today I'm happy to share some of our thoughts with you.

Luc Vidal Madjar: For enterprise, IoT is always about large deployment, at least thousands of devices and sometimes up to millions. As a basis, this means that any manual management of devices must be reduced to a minimum and that, as much as possible, everything must be automated. Hyperautomation is going one step further. IoT solutions generate a very large amount of data, not only because we talk about a large number of devices but as well because their complexity is becoming higher and higher. The challenge for enterprises is then about how to process this data, how to get the most value out of it and finally how to take the most efficient business decision and for each device on the field. Hyperautomation is here for this. In short, it is about generating as much value as possible from data generated by IoT solutions.

Luc Vidal Madjar: IoT solution are always truly, always, made of three parts: the device, the connectivity, and the application. So traditionally, IoT platforms have been focusing on one single piece of this IoT solution. At the end, it means that the enterprise have been managing three IoT platforms: The first one is a device management platform that do things like controlling devices during their entire lifecycle, provision them during their deployment, check their sanity, perform firmware updates over the air etc, etc. The second one is the connectivity management platform that typically controls the SIM card inside the IoT device and as well all the connectivity configuration to support the IoT use case. It also provide real time visibility on the connectivity, provide analytics on usage cost on network events, etc, etc, etc. Finally, last one is the application management platform. This one will actually process the data generated by the device and, ultimately it will allow either to take automated decision and action.

Luc Vidal Madjar: It can also show the data in a meaningful representation for the enterprise team to take the business decision. These IoT application platforms are typically completely designed for vertical IoT use cases, and then it means that you have a very large number of these. It can be, and just to name a few: for fleet management for smart buildings, for healthcare, etc, etc. While on the other hand, the connectivity and device management platform are more horizontally designed and agnostic to the IoT use case. So the trend we can foresee is that the enterprise in the coming years will more and more need to have a single IoT platform to manage end-to-end the IoT solution. Using several platforms is becoming too complex and a lot of information is lost across different platforms. As well, and we speak about that later, a single IoT platform will be one of the driver for digital twin adoption.

Luc Vidal Madjar: The first criteria where an IoT deployment requires hyperautomation is its size. The bigger the deployment, the more automation needs to be set up across all the operation and management activities. And the more automation you have, the more value you can extract from data generated by IoT solutions. Then the second criteria is data requirement. The more you need fast decision, the more you need fast actions, the more important is automation. We can name here a few use cases for asset monitoring, security, connected vehicles, smart building. We believe this one will typically be the first one to adopt the hyperautomation.

Luc Vidal Madjar: In the IoT world, the digital twin is a live software representation of IoT solution. It provides a single view of all its physical and digital components that have value to support the business of the enterprise. It is called a twin since it aims at providing the most complete view end-to-end of the IoT solution being the device, the connectivity, all the application and everything in real time. The final goal of a digital twin is to facilitate efficient business decision. Hyperautomation is then here to ultimate efficiency, reducing the operation and management workload to the minimum. Remember, we spoke about it that IoT is always about very large number of devices to manage. If this is not automated, you reduce a lot than you can process. In the IoT space, digital twins can be used I would say across any use cases. In the B2B IoT space, for example, to monitor the sanity of each device, to detect whether there is any fault and to identify the faulty part of the solution to alert on some security risk, etc, etc. In the B2C IoT space, it allows to collect information on end user experience on its usage for the different part of the IoT product that there's a device functionality, the application feature, then it can trigger some targeting marketing action for example. It can also be used for more expensive connected infrastructure such as smart building, smart manufacturing, or smart city. And it can be used in that spaces for application that does call management, power utilization security etc. The possibilities are limitless. So at the end to conclude, digital twins are becoming altogether a best practice for full control of IoT deployment with an end-to-end perspective. And a must-have to extract the most value for the IoT data and as well a foundation to achieve hyperautomation on smart IoT.