Guest post by Jason English, Principal Analyst, Intellyx
Surely you’ve caught some of the excitement about drones for enterprise use. Packages and communications delivered to the world by these ultimately mobile IoT fliers. Heavy VC investment in commercial and supply chain drone applications could drive this sector to be worth as much as $13 billion by 2020.
We all remember Amazon teasing a drone-delivery future in this now-famous ad from 5 years ago. But there’s no way the online retailer will corner this game. Expect drone delivery research to advance quickly at leading transportation firms like FedEx, UPS and DHL. Uber Eats might even have drones fly over some sushi for engineers too busy for lunch.
But could drones possibly become passé for widespread business use before they can even get out of the hangar?
Drones are the ultimate IoT play for enterprise
Of all the interesting ‘things’ in the commercial IoT continuum, from geo-location tags in trucks and packages, to remote cameras, factory robots, smart sensors and controls, power meters, wearables and medical devices, nothing captures our imagination quite like a drone.
In a sense, drones can let our productive work ‘slip the surly bonds of earth,’ with the ability to move anything, and see anything, almost anywhere in the world. It gives businesses a flock of birds to command, rather than the two-dimensional constraints of surface dwelling gadgets and robots.
Take the telecommunications industry. The ability to dispatch a maintenance drone to inspect and verify the equipment on a relay tower can save a human technician a risky and time-consuming day trip up the pole for a visual inspection, improving service efficiency while reducing insurance premiums.
In many cases, the drones are even replacing telco network infrastructure themselves, maintaining a tethered position to provide communication services or wi-fi coverage services to the ground below, especially in emergency outage conditions. Facebook killed its ambitious Aquila project to expand global internet access last year, but that isn’t stopping other regional and private drone network programs.
