People
Today I attended a meetup about strategic MS’s Azure Hubs. The MS model for Azure is getting complex but powerful. It seems that MS plan is to offer large capabilities within strategically defined hubs of services oriented to an ecosystem of specific products.
One of those hubs is Events: a telemetry oriented hub for supporting devices remotely. The other one is Analytics & IoT, which is about taking data from the device and analyse it.
When used together the possibilities are huge. With one, the data is captured through remote systems. With the other one, the data is analysed. The data could be used for a particular action:
Control of the conditions the device is monitoring.
Controlling the device itself (eg. maintenance).
The impacts, and in particular the social impacts, could be huge, with advantages and disadvantages. Eg. again, this would replace the need of specialists to monitor on those devices, or at least would encourage remote centralisation, rendering on-site human resources less relevant.
The impact of devices controlling themselves could have strong benefits, it seems that the human resource is less and less needed in this possible society. Below a video about what IoT together new devices like HoloLens could do. When watching, think about what for technician you will need to carry out the task. Is this good, bad, or just different? And the payroll, how the company will consider the new personnel? The near future is proving interesting, but challenging.