Times have changed. If it took at least a decade for global tech to hit Indian soil, now India is at the forefront of technological innovations and early interventions. However, we have to cover a lot of ground quickly. The government shares this vision, especially with its Smart City roadmap. They intend to spend a significant amount of money on smart city projects to make the 100 cities more sustainable. The government plans to establish Integrated command centers in all 100 smart cities by August. According to Deloitte, India presently has 60 million IoT devices, with the number expected to reach over two billion in the next three to four years.

"From retail to healthcare and energy to manufacturing, the upcoming year will bring more advanced IoT solutions, improving sustainability, productivity, and safety of operations"

Until now, the benefits of IoT in commercial applications have been numerous. IT and business stakeholders collaborate to align IoT initiatives with business goals to meet revenue and customer experience targets. Security concerns, including connectivity in industrial automation, remain deterring as certain parts of India lack access to the internet. Prosenjit Sengupta, CDO, Thermax Limited, with two decades of experience in the automotive industry and who has been awarded as the Top 50 CIO of India for two consecutive years, takes a deep dive with CIO Insider into the spectrum of IoT. In conversation with Prosenjit by CIO Insider Team.

Could you tell us about sectors that are currently leveraging IoT the most?
The established sectors such as Automobile, Line Manufacturing, Agriculture, Hospitality, Retail, Logistics and Transportation, Finance and banking, Oil & Gas are widely leveraging IoT. Whereas Healthcare, Home automation & real estate, and of course, education, among others, are the latest to deploy this technology, with utility and smart cities to join the bandwagon in the near future.

Could you state a few factors widely driving investments for enterprise IoT products and services?
IoT is often considered the key driver for business growth for reasons starting with efficiency, which moves businesses from reactive to proactive. Since timely and accurate information enables actionable insights to drive change by cutting costs and improving efficiency. Secondly, deeper insights across many related data allow enterprises to sort elements into perspectives enabling access to data both in real-time and over time to arrive at precise predictions and better decision making. It provides transparency with transportation, in particular, room for new business ideas for gizmos and startups and energy efficiency and sustainability.

Which areas do you suggest market participants
should emphasize to devise and align their

market strategies as per the IoT market dynamics this year?
For retail, as it tends to get smarter post-pandemic, emphasis should be placed on price, staff, stocks, and supplies. Operations, site safety, stocks for industrial IoT. ERP, PLM, MES, CRM with site and customer operations & efficiencies for IT & OT merger. Machine learning can be deployed as a logical step in improving training, evaluation, and prediction. Platform plays across IoT bazaars into many assets and service players, urbanization of IoT, and IoT security.

Which areas do you suggest market participants should emphasize to devise and align their market strategies as per the IoT market dynamics this year?
For retail, as it tends to get smarter post-pandemic, emphasis should be placed on price, staff, stocks, and supplies. Operations, site safety, stocks for industrial IoT. ERP, PLM, MES, CRM with site and customer operations & efficiencies for IT & OT merger. Machine learning can be deployed as a logical step in improving training, evaluation, and prediction. Platform plays across IoT bazaars into many assets and service players, urbanization of IoT, and IoT security.