Internet of Things undermined by a lack of standards, warns Pentaho VP EMEA Paul Scholey

While Hadoop provides a popular analytics foundation for connected devices' data, there are few other standards supporting the Internet of Things

A lack of standards, even for something as simple as communication protocols for devices, is undermining the Internet of Things push, despite the popularity of the Hadoop framework for analytics at the backend.

That is the warning of Pentaho VP EMEA and APAC Paul Scholey, speaking in today's Computing web seminar, Making new connections: First steps with the Internet of Things". "Hadoop is one of the biggest, disruptive technology drivers of recent years. Its ability to store massive volumes of disparate, unstructured and structured data is well accepted now.

"One of the issues with the Internet of Things is that there are no standards in this world. For example, there are no standards governing the types of data that get generated from different sensors; no standards whatsoever.

"So, different devices from different manufacturers that even aspire to do the same things can have radically different data formats and potentially different touch-points, such as frequencies of generating that data."

Pentaho believes Hadoop is a good platform. "Most of the organisations that we see taking advantage of the Internet of Things have Hadoop as a cornerstone," he said. "But you really need some agility or flexibility in that environment. So, is Hadoop the answer to everything? Probably not... You really need to think about the volume, variety, the velocity; you need a hybrid architecture because ultimately no-one really knows where this is heading."

However, argued Dr Hamid Falaki, senior technologist at Digital Catapult, there are some solutions to this standards challenge emerging.

"At HyperCat Summit 2015 in London a couple of weeks ago, an initiative by Innovate UK sought to address this problem with standardisation for bringing in the data parameters that can be read by analytics devices, making it easier for analytics to deliver the value of the data across multiple verticals," said Falaki.

"Standards are essential. There are some movements in the industry, and we need to embrace them and take them to the next stage."

ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, is also working on standards, he continued, such as M2M. 5G, the next generation of mobile communications, may also provide a foundation for device-to-device communications. "However, it is early days," said Falaki, and the standards initiatives at the moment are merely scratching the surface.

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