Let’s begin with the basics: The Internet of Things is a computing concept that describes the idea of everyday physical objects being connected to the internet and able to identify themselves to other devices so they can send and receive data — as in, they can “speak” to each other. And some of the biggest businesses are putting IoT technology to work to improve their operations in ways big and small.
So what kinds of things can IoT technology do? “There can be sensors for alerting when shelves need to be replenished or tracking to tell where items are in the supply chain,” says Sucharita Kodali, an analyst at Forrester. She cites IoT’s use in Amazon Go stores and smart carts.
Walmart has been using IoT devices to monitor energy output, among other things, according to Sanjay Radhakrishnan, the company’s vice president of global technology. In a Walmart blog post, Radhakrishnan describes how the company manages more than 7 million unique IoT data points across its U.S. stores. “Every day, this network of connected devices sends almost 1.5 billion messages regarding temperature, operating functions and energy use,” he writes.
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