The successful technology revolutions that have occurred or will occur are as follows:

1. Centralized computing
2. The PC and distributed computing
3. The Internet
4. Mobile (connected) computing
5. Ubiquitous embedded intelligence

It’s not easy to prepare for a technology revolution. Everyone knew the Internet was going to happen in the sense of “one huge network” but nobody quite knew how. Even when it began, it wasn’t clear where it was headed. It developed in an unpredictable manner. It all seems logical looking back, but then again, the rearview mirror always presents a familiar picture.

The same has been true of mobile. The mobile revolution only really took off with the iPhone, even though mobile phones had been around forever and the Blackberry had rolled up “crackberry” addicts by the million. The iPhone was the first genuine mobile platform, not because of its cool touch interface, but because Apple created a viable software ecosystem around it. Mobile phones have moved from being phones to smart phones to mobile platforms with GPS and location based services.

So if we think of the technology revolution of embedded systems, right now nobody has much of an idea of how it will pan out and where the action will be. It’s far too early.

Nevertheless, I had an interesting briefing on this from IBM Tivoli recently.

Tivoli And The Smart World

IBM is moving into this area and starting to talk intelligently about the “Smart World” -  the smart world being one where devices have increasing levels of intelligence. I don’t like the term “Smart World” particularly because it’s diffuse.  I think of this yet-to-happen revolution as really being about “state-aware devices”,  which means “things that know their state and are able to report on it.”

As technology becomes cheaper more and more devices will have embedded processors and sensors, and they’ll self regulate – so they’ll be a little better at what they do or even a lot better. Devices will “phone it in” when any component fails and they’ll also know where they are, so stealing such devices is going to be a challenge. Most of that is easy to see.

What is not so clear is what the benefits will be when you aggregate all of this together. So hats off to IBM Tivoli for providing a good analysis of what it may mean. The picture that Tivoli paints is of a grand convergence between 5 distinct worlds:

1. Moving things: This includes vehicles themselves of course, if vehicles of various types are corporate assets, but it also means people and things in vehicles. You could think of this as technology providing an awareness of where everything is, so you at least have the chance of reducing latencies between events – or if you’re worried about vehicles themselves, then it’s about keeping them rolling.
2. Facilities: One of the aspects of an organization that IT hasn’t thought much about is the facility – the spaces in which things get done. Pretty soon all those facilities are going to be awash with embedded chips, whether they’re in security systems (doors, cameras, etc.), supply systems (power supply, A/C, and everything down to coffee machines and water coolers), provisioning (desks, chairs, cubicles, meeting rooms). Even data centers will be far more “aware of themselves and what’s in them”.
3. Production: This is similar to “moving things” except that we’re talking in general about things moving around in about in factories or production environments. This area is already “smart” to some degree because of the use of RFID tags, they are not yet widely used. If you take this together with facilities and moving things then you have “the body of the organization including all its motion. Why do I mention this? Because the next two worlds make up the nervous system.
4. IT itself: Just about everywhere employees or customers or agents of suppliers are, there will also be intelligent access devices with local intelligence and the possibility of accessing a powerful set of server resources to run applications of just about any kind.
5. Communications: The final area, which has been rapidly converging with IT since the advent of the Internet, is communications. However we still don’t have a unified communications capability worth talking about. But it’s coming with presence servers and SIP servers and the growth of social networks and a wide variety of collaboration capability.

Now consider all of that taken together and add in the idea that all of it will be IP-addressable and you have what IBM Tivoli is calling Dynamic Infrastructure. And, of course, multiple aspects of such a dynamic infrastructure could be optimized towards specific business goals.

A landscape like that would be very different to the one we currently inhabit.