Around 100,000 attendees flocked to Barcelona this month to attend the world’s largest wireless trade show, Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018. The event, which showcased products and services from providers all over the world, had plenty of content revolving around 5G, IoT, Connectivity, and Artificial Intelligence. It was exciting to see how advancements in technology allowed for cool new capabilities such as facial recognition and light-speed internet – thousands of vendors from all over the world exhibited products that were newly designed to be sleeker, smaller, and more user friendly.

All of the digitization in today’s society has led to ease of use and increased convenience for us at the consumer level. It was easy to buy into the hype- who doesn’t love the idea of a car that drives itself, drones with HD cameras, or a smart home to take the hassle out of your busy day? IoT enables this technology, with the help of inexpensive sensors, cloud infrastructure, and improved analytics. 

GSMA Intelligence predicted that there will be 25b connections to IOT globally in 2025, including 5.6b connections in Europe, 5.8 b connections in North America, 1.3b in Latin America, 1.4b in Africa and the Middle East, and 10.9b in Asia-Pacific. Specific to Industrial IoT (IIoT), there will be 13.7b connections worldwide by 2025, up from 2.9b today, including utilities, smart buildings, fleet management, manufacturing, smart cities, and retail.

Unsurprisingly, the buzz at MWC revolved around consumer IoT – wearables, smart TVs, connected cars – however, without IIOT and the benefits it brings to the supply chain, these innovations in consumer technology may not have been possible. Specific to just IIoT, there will be 13.7b connections worldwide by 2025, up from 2.9b today, including utilities, smart buildings, fleet management, manufacturing, smart cities, and retail.  The development of this kind of disruptive technology calls for increased visibility, increased mobility, and increased innovation within the supply chain.

Oracle’s IoT applications, summarized below, help businesses to reach their true ROI by integrating IoT with business applications and business value. Supply chains are now fully optimized via real time alerts and smart analysis- our applications use advanced machine learning to make predictions based on patterns to help organizations continue their business uninterrupted. Organizations in all industries can benefit from increased operational efficiencies via improved connectivity, cost and time savings, and increased flexibility.

Smarter supply chains enabled by IoT can help manufacturers understand their demand and inventory better, accelerate innovation and improve quality by enabling information exchange across supply chains for better decisions, planning, and execution. Oracle goes beyond the platform offering to provide organizations with Software as a Service (SaaS) Industrial IoT applications.

Oracle IoT Apps

These are the applications that provide Oracle customers with a smart way to address specific problems out of the gate. Oracle IT applications are built with specific use cases in specific industries:

Asset Monitoring – Keep track of capital intensive assets by monitoring their location or monitoring the asset’s health and utilization.

Service Monitoring for Connected Assets –  Keep track of assets deployed at customer locations – track any asset to decrease downtime and reduce maintenance costs.

Production Monitoring – For manufacturers that have factories where machines are producing, Oracle’s production monitoring app oversees the factory and understands which machines and what production lines are falling behind on production plans and costing money.

Fleet Monitoring – For businesses that want to monitor the condition of a shipment, monitor fuel consumption, or the condition of their entire fleet, Oracle Fleet monitoring enables them to optimize their processes.

Connected Worker – Businesses that have workers in hazardous areas such as oil rigs or construction zones have the ability to minimize workplace accidents by tracking employee location, condition, and status.

Mobile World Congress was an exciting opportunity to see how disruptive technology is being developed at companies all over the world. We look forward to seeing what capabilities Oracle’s IoT technology will enable going forward. For more information, read Director of Product Marketing Albert Chiang’s take on the conference, as well as his detailed summary on Oracle’s current IoT applications.