Distance MBA in Information Technology: Know Technology skills for Career in Internet of Thing (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new level of automation. It is a system of interconnected intelligent physical devices/sensors called “Things”. These things are connected to the computer systems over internet. This has opened up humongous possibilities in various sectors like healthcare, retail, automobile, manufacturing, construction and so on.

Number of connected devices are already in the range of billions and companies want to process and leverage this data for improving efficiency and customer experience. Cloud vendors like AWS and Microsoft Azure have taken lead in offering cloud platform to process the data collected and then generating different analytics reports using it.

The combined markets of the Internet of Things will grow to about $520 billion in 2021, more than double the $235 billion spent in 2017. – Bain and Company report

Technology Skills to master IoT for a distance MBA

Things (Devices/Sensors)

With IoT, the computer systems are given more eyes, ears and feel through deployment of intelligent sensors. These physical devices or sensors deployed on the field are the key information generators in case of IoT systems. They are called “Things”.

Many different types of sensors like light sensor, motion sensor, proximity sensor are available online. Before choosing the sensor, one needs to understand the functions of sensor and its specification like accuracy and precision, so that meaningful data can be captured.

These sensor typically come with input/output interface and need assembly language or microcontroller programming to interact with them. This is the area which is popularly known as embedded programming.
Now-a-days, high level programming languages like Python, Java Script, Luva can also be used to interact with these sensors or physical devices. Prototypes can be created using general purpose microcontroller boards such as Rasberry Pi, Arduino etc.

Connectivity (Protocols)

In an IoT system, there are hundreds of sensors or edge devices which need to talk to each other and to information collection points or gateways. Secondly, this data goes on to the cloud for further processing and analytics. Huge number of sensors, complexity of the interconnections, power consumption for the devices, latency for data capture and transmission are the main challenges while designing an IoT system.

There are various protocols used in the system based on the requirements of cost, power consumption etc. Some of the typical names are WiFi, MQTT, Low Energy Bluetooth, Zigbee, RFID, LoRa, SigFox, NB-IoT etc.

Application Development

IoT applications are typically controlled from a web application or from a mobile phone app. The user interface are of the responsive UI type so that they can work on web as well as mobile phones seamlessly.

Mobile and web applications are developed using high level languages like Java, Node.js, Angular.js, and React JS and react native, Swift and so on. UI and UX designers are in demand for IoT projects. As many IoT applications are based on wearable which are location-aware, GPS/GIS developers are in high demand. These developers use maps, longitudes and latitudes to add the context of location-awareness to the application.

IoT platforms

There are many custom emerging developer kits for building IoT applications. With some experience on web based application development one may be able to create his/her own framework using technologies like Node.js.

There are many IoT platforms from different technology vendors. Technology Principals or OEMs like Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce have their own IoT platforms as well as system integrators like HCL also have created their custom IoT platform. These platforms help rapid prototyping and got tools for building, deploying and managing IoT applications. These platforms also provide capabilities of data analytics.

Data Analytics

Number of devices from which data is gathered is increasing in geometrical progression. It is really big data. To use this data effectively, the developers will need to process this data to derive insights. Developers also need to have good hand on big data and analytics technologies like Hadoop, Spark and No SQL databases like MongoDB and others.

From this huge data intelligent insights can be derived using machine learning and artificial intelligence. AI and ML can be applied in real-time on the data streams coming from various sensors to do predictive analytics.
How knowledge of IoT is important for distance MBA

With rapidly growing adoption of IoT, the demand for skilled professionals is increasing. There are two reasons why a distance MBA student should start reading about IoT. If you are from information technology background, knowledge of IoT would give you an advantage in selection for job interviews. If you are a manager from any discipline who has to deal with information technology solution has to know IoT so that he can understand and handle automation projects better. Hence knowing IoT is critical need for budding managers!