Last week we attended the Accenture Innovation Summit. A yearly event to put the spotlight on startups and the innovative side of information technology. The last two years we have been visiting the event as guests, this year we had the honour to host a round table and run a booth together with Dell EMC and our customer digitalAngel. It was really inspirational to watch all these young people setting up businesses and using IT as a tool to actually solve real world problems.
My IT career started in 1995 and in 2000 we founded our company Nalta Consultancy. In 2000 the word startup wasn't even invented yet, we were just named young entrepreneurs. Our focus on services at Nalta was not mainstream and being able to actually build IT infrastructure solutions was called pure magic. Much has changed since that time. A lot of the stuff we found special is mandatory and is commonplace nowadays. The power of a smartphone far exceeds that of a middle of the road server rack in 2000. Functionality was bound to processing power and the laws of ever increasing costs to run these processes, now the possibilities are endless and costs diminished.
We live in an age where we increasingly focus on the functional and practical use of a business-process or -application, in other words how IT plays an integral part at the business's core. IT is Just like a car for the new millennial generation, having the car is not longer the goal, mobility is the goal, the car being demoted to an exchangeable resource.
For me as a person and for Nalta Group as a whole the Internet of Things is a great 'new invention', re-igniting our passion for our business. It bridges the gap between the business-needs and the great possibilities of today's low cost sensor-, network-, processing-technology. It is so much more rewarding to deliver a solution that solves a human problem compared to building a sole infrastructure-solution that has so much distance to the actual use case. That is why we are so proud of the digitalAngel Internet of Things platform. This IoT solution really increases the quality of healthcare.
At the Accenture Innovation awards it was great to see so many young people and startups delivering solutions with this practical non-IT goal in mind. IT systems as a resource to deliver innovative business solutions. I especially liked examples like knowingo.com a smart learning platform and Somnox world's first sleeping robot.
Our generation of pre-startups and corporate's as a whole should learn from this young group of entrepreneurs to leverage IT and not to mistake IT as being the goal. The promise of Internet of Things is just so much more than the sum of internet & things.