Somshubhro Pal Choudhury, MD, Analog Devices India, speaks to Abhishek Raval on the necessity of processing only the critical data on the cloud to get fast and targeted results
How cloud can be used for processing IoT related data ?
To directly transport sensor data onto the cloud through a gateway is a recipe for disaster. This leads to a surge in Opex. The Capex investments will also have to be made at the same scale. The radio that enables wireless data transmission has to be always on, which will abuse the battery capacity. IoT is all about creating a ‘Sensor to the cloud’ system, which is solving a business problem at a good RoI. On the contrary, we are spending more energy transmitting wirelessly compared to doing computing at a given node. It requires a fat pipe.
The right way would be to do the initial analysis on-premise, sense the data, analyse it and only send the relevant data that needs to be processed upon on the cloud. for e.g. In case of a CCTV footage at a particular showroom has to be transferred to a nearest police station in case of a theft incident, the conventional method is the police takes the DVR and checks the footage frame by frame however by then the culprit has gone too far. How about writing an algorithm which triggers a series of snapshots from the footage about the incident, when it’s happening? It is then relayed in real time to the nearest police station. This way the police can respond to the situation immediately and not after the culprit is at large. Analogue devices’ forte is about writing such algorithms.
If IoT has to be realised at a cheapest possible cost, not all but selected data has to be moved to the cloud.
Where does India stand globally, in terms of IoT ?
India is at the crossroads. We missed the PC revolution altogether, late- by about ten years. But with IoT, India already has a grip over a lot of the essentials. We understand the IT infrastructure, cloud, analytics, networking. On the hardware side, India doesn’t have the same grip. In other cities like Boston, Silicon valley, Israel, a lot of these pieces are happening together.
This is an opportunity for India to leapfrog with IoT. The good news is on the talent front, India is at par or a tad low compared to standards attained by the likes of Silicon valley. We are strong in designing a cloud based IoT platform, however we lack in the following areas – designing a new IoT protocol, IoT database, a new IoT wireless protocol, designing specific algorithm for machine analytics, the fundamental innovation, is where we are behind.
From a business standpoint, the opportunities are flowing in steadily due to the Government’s Digital India, Make in India programmes. These initiatives are greenfield and thus, there is potential for workplaces, factories to be designed smart from the ground up.
What kind of work ADI is doing on the IoT space in India ?
Innovation remains the key to Analogue Devices India (ADI). We plough back close to 20% of the revenues back into R&D. ADI is a semiconductor company. Most of our peers play in the processor and consumer domain because of volumes lucrativeness.
ADI has chosen a different path. Majority of the information generated, stored and consumed in enterprises is stored digitally however, the important information generated in the physical world – radiowaves, temperature, vital signs monitoring, motion is still captured in the form of analogue signals. What we do is convert this physical parameter information into an electrical signal, which has to be filtered from the surrounding noise. It needs to be amplified, converted into digital from analogue and finally it becomes processor friendly, to be digitally processed. This is our DNA. We are an analogue bridge to the digital world.
Texas Instruments, Linear Technology and Maxim Integrated are our top three competitors. We have close to hundred thousand customers globally. Some 20 – 30 strategic customers are handled directly by us while the rest are handled by our partners.
Meteorology and energy are the key highlights of the verticals we operate in. Some 300 mn energy meters globally run on sensors provided by us.
The base stations of the telecommunication companies also uses AD devices to convert radio signals into digital signals. It’s then converted into voice. We also provide automotive electronics – sensors to trigger airbags; traffic light detection, lane departure warning etc.
In the healthcare space, in the last two years we have focussed on technologies like motion detection, heart rate monitoring and stress measurement for wearables.
In the consumer space, our technologies make possible the high quality surround sound from the speakers, cancelling the noise and conditioning the sound by identifying the right parameters.
What are your plans for the india CoE?
The strategy has been – the CoE should not just be a backend support center for our global products. Since 1995, the center has been doing end to end design to back end support work. We have a Digital Signal Processing and IoT CoE. Multiple products have been designed and tested at the CoE and the support is also provided from India.
We also take help of the design houses to manufacture our products. A good 25-30 percent of our work – over and above the work done by the ADI employees, is done by the design houses. Usually it applies to manufacturing derivative chips.
What’s the profile of customers in India?
We have 1000+ clients both in the PSU and the MNC space. DRDO, ISRO, SMEs providing ancillary support to the defence sector have been our customers for many years.
The second bucket of customers are from the SMEs located in western India. The Nashik, Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Delhi belt. These are smaller size SMEs, single family owned.
Another set of customers are coming from the space of startups. I personally track about 250 IoT startups.
