The IoT, Internet of Things, has arrived. Sensors are everywhere, collecting more and more data about us and the world around us. Temperature, Humidity, Fluid Levels, Traffic counts, the status of devices and things like doors and elevators are being collected and distributed all around us. The question now is "What do we do with all that data?

As we roll into the next decade and IoT becomes commonplace in most organizations, requirements for connectivity will change. Over the last decade of Wi-Fi, we’ve seen a push for faster speeds (high throughput and very high throughput) and recently the ability for greater capacity (high efficiency). Wireless IoT protocols have a different focus. Those requirements are long distance, low power, and flexible architecture. As we consider the next generation, which capabilities rise to the top?

OK, folks. Let’s be real for a moment and acknowledge that everybody, every professional, and definitely every vendor out there is tossing out the phrase “IoT” like flyers on the Las Vegas strip. As an industry, we tend to use IoT to describe a breadth of networked devices, most often headless—those without a user attached—such as cameras, door entry systems, and HVAC controls.

My name is Kat Cosgrove, and I’m a Developer Advocate at JFrog. Before that, I was an engineer on JFrog’s IoT team. Our goal is to bring DevOps to the edge, because it shouldn’t be as difficult to update these kinds of devices as it currently is. In pursuit of this goal, we found a lot of interesting solutions that we could bring into a CI/CD pipeline for embedded Linux devices, and eventually built a rather flashy proof of concept that put several of these solutions on display.

The energy industry used to operate on a simple hub-and-spoke model, in which large power plants would produce energy in a centralized location and distribute it out to consumers. Yet as solar, wind, and other small-scale renewable energy sources take hold in the market, that hub-and-spoke model is being replaced by a complex grid of interconnected devices.

“What would it be like to have an asset monitoring solution that can be installed within minutes and is independent of all existing IT systems, without endangering existing processes?” LineMetrics was founded in 2012 in Haag, Austria, in response to questions just like this one. LineMetrics developed a complete real-time asset monitoring solution delivered through its end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) platform.