The Death of the Too Late Architecture is Still Greatly Exaggerated
The Internet of Things is finally coming of age. Bain estimates that 30,000 developers are building IoT apps in the cloud, signifying that businesses are automating real-time decisions based on data from wind turbines, connected vehicles, and drones. But that momentum is smoke, not fire. 30,000 is less than 1% of the estimated 26 million developers in the world. Real-time still isn’t mainstream.
Moreover, experts say that just 11% of companies have access to less than an hour-old data. That’s a lot of companies flying blind in real-time! TIBCO founder Vivek Ranadivé called this The Too Late Architecture. Who cares if you decide after the opportunity is gone? It’s too late!
Ranadivé envisioned an alternative approach in his book, the Two-Second Advantage. He called it an Enterprise Nervous System. Like your body’s nervous system, an enterprise nervous system helps firms sense-and-respond to real-time inputs.
But technologies don’t go mainstream until they’re easy to use and cheap.
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IoT is cheap thanks to the commoditization of sensors, the ubiquity of IoT platforms, and the stabilization of IoT standards. But cost is just half the battle. Bain advises that IoT success is "about analytics, not simply connecting devices.”
Four technologies make real-time analytics easy: streaming data preparation, streaming analytics, streaming data science, and streaming visual analytics--have all come of age. Here’s how they form a modern Enterprise Nervous System:
The demise of the Too Late Architecture is greatly exaggerated. But if it’s four billion times more important to make a fast decision than a perfect one, then seizing the Two-Second Advantage is a great business opportunity for 2021.
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To learn more about the Enterprise Nervous System in action, here are my favorite examples from the past few months alone:
Smart trains from Spanish train manufacturer CAF: Train-alytics
300 IoT sensors on Mercedes AMG Formula One cars: The Fastest R&D lab on earth
KBTG Bank and Morgan Stanley talk about digital banking in Real-Time Open Banking
IoT-aware mining: Batman AI
