During the keynote address at today’s DCD Enterprise event in New York, IBM VP Mac Devine, told the audience that he had never seen so much venture capital investment go into one industry segment in such a short space of time.

He said that the need for “cloud speed” – an ability to respond to challenges at the rate of technology transformation – is a primary factor between success and failure in today’s emerging Internet of Things (IoT) era. But providing useful business solutions that meet customer expectations are just as important, according Mac Devine, VP and CTO of IBM’s SoftLayer division. 

“I deal a lot with the venture capital community, and I’ve never seen so much VC money pouring into a space as I’ve seen with IoT,” he contended. “It’s because there is so much great potential, and so many ways to innovate.”

There is so much innovation in the IoT space, Devine continued – people making sensors, doing analytics to interact with sensors, cloud-based security services to interact with these sensors. “The companies that focus on providing real business value will succeed; the other ones will fall off,” he added. If [potential innovators] focus on just connectivity and messaging to a device – without a way to provide real business outcomes – then they will not survive.”

Today’s data center environment is driven by change, and the IoT has the potential to provide better outcomes driven by real information in as real-time a manner as possible. “It won’t do you any good if you don’t meet expectations of the service you are trying to provide”, Devine warned. For example, he noted, “If I can provide something in a day, but the expectation and need is one hour, then I’ve failed.” Setting realistic expectations of what you can provide, and focusing on how much speed your infrastructure requires should be the driving forces in managing this changing environment, he explained.

“We realized early on that the world was going to be instrumented; that it was going to be interconnected,” the SoftLayer CTO recalled.

Divine said IBM is aiding the process by providing a reference architecture of “soft standards” to promote a common set rules that empower intelligent IT systems running the IoT. “I believe you will see lots of innovation continue to occur…but over the next 12 months, you will see people figure out how to monetize these IT use cases into business outcomes that really matter,” he predicted. “I think you will see a massive maturation in this space.”