Why many companies are not thinking big enough about IoT

TechRepublic’s Conner Forrest spoke with Mimi Spier, vice president of Internet of Things business at VMware, who discusses how IoT is transforming industries and changing the world. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.

Mimi Spier: When I work with companies, they’re very much focused on what use cases should I do. Should I start with predictive maintenance? Should I start with a new customer experience? Should I start with a new revenue model? But what I really want to encourage them to do is, you need your one-to- three year plan. You need to get started. You need to have an infrastructure in place that can allow you to roll out and adapt to IoT. But most importantly, as a company that’s part of a bigger industry and as part of a bigger world, there’s so many macro trends that are happening today across different industries, that I think companies need to be thinking that big.

Let me give you some examples. So, if you think about agriculture, in the future we will need to produce 70% more food, but we only have 5% more land. How do you do that? It’s almost impossible, but if you think about how to apply technology like IoT and indoor farming as one example, you could actually produce almost 400 times the amount of food, with 95% less water.

SEE: Enterprise IoT calculator: TCO and ROI (Tech Pro Research)

So what does that mean? Well, for your company, that’s a big advantage. But it means that you are driving a more sustainable world. You are having an impact in your industry that will completely transform your entire industry.

And I think companies need to be thinking that big, and have those uber goals that they’re going to reach while they start small, and they get successful. And they have a strong foundation in IoT. And you can apply this to automotive with the autonomous vehicle. You can apply this to energy because two thirds of energy is being consumed by cities.

There’s so much we can do with that to make it more efficient and more sustainable. And that’s the part that is inspiring, and that’s the part that we all need to get involved in that will ultimately change the world.

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