TCS “Bringing Life To Things” – An IoT Business Framework to Unlock Exponential Value

With over 5 billion devices¹ connected, IoT is on the agenda of organizations across almost all industry segments. Many companies have already started their own IoT adoption journey, and upon digging deeper it is revealed that most firms are focusing on point solutions that are restricted to proof of technology or incremental improvements only.

This tentative and siloed approach of many organizations has resulted in missing out on exponential benefits from IoT initiatives. With the above challenges in mind, TCS has launched a Business Framework that focuses on bringing value to the customers’ business through structured IoT value generation roadmap – the TCS Bringing Life to Things^TM Business Framework. This path to exponential value creation consists of the Business Dimensions and Technical Constructs aimed toward keeping value at the core of the IoT discussion and solution by guiding customers to develop a “Path to Value” Roadmap model across their organizational functions and integrated value chains. This in turn helps the customer provide seamless End-Customer Experiences, Optimized & Responsive Value Chains, and New Business Models such as Subscription and Servitization.

An organization may truly reap exponential benefits when they are able to respond to physical context with Digital Intelligence. The Bringing Life to Things^TM   framework Business Dimension provides multiple ready-to-use blueprint (out-of-box) solutions catering to verticals such as Logistics, Manufacturing, Transportation, Utilities, Automotive, and Life Sciences. All these solutions exercise the principles of the Bringing Life to Things^TM Framework which include being Boundary-Less (Ecosystem of the enterprise should include a network of connected value chains), Pervasive (System is ever responsive and ready to serve 24*7) and Rich-Experience (where value creation, delivery and consumption is frictionless and system has seamless feedback loop)².

The second part of the Bringing Life to Things™ framework is the Technical Constructs. These characteristics apply to all TCS IoT Solutions and Services: 

• “Connect in context”: Increasing intelligence and reducing decision making latency by means of leveraging Edge and Cloud resources in the proper contexts for sensors and data handling.
• “Being Predictive”: Making the value chain more responsive through improved decision making. Real time Insights that use the digital data to do predictive analysis reduce the dependency on less informed methods and on-the-fly decisions that delay business value creation.
• “Becoming Self Aware”: A critical factor of a self-sustaining system is the ability to infuse “things” to become self-optimizing and self-healing. TCS believes that IoT can enable “self-aware” devices and systems to act on their own, thus “Bringing Life to Things^TM.”

A perfect example that illustrates the above narrative is TCS IP2^TM (Intelligent Power Plant). TCS IP2^TM provides real time information on power generation assets such as boilers, turbines, and generators. These insights in turn help plant operators predict and preempt failures, optimize operations, lower fuel consumption, and cut emissions³. TCS IP2^TM makes power plant operations autonomous and not merely automated. IP2 works synchronously to augment human capabilities by combining AI, engineering & domain knowledge, and intelligent analytics to predict, address and reduce inefficiencies in power plants by bringing life to its assets, processes and operations and making the system self-aware.

To fully realize the “Path to Value,” it is important to have a combination of critical elements in place.  With a shared vision of driving enterprise innovation, TCS and AWS offer industry-specific solutions that deliver benefits for our customers⁴ by complementing TCS’ contextual IoT and industry knowledge with the power of AWS IoT services.

A few  insights on how AWS Services enables the three Technical Constructs of the TCS Bringing Life to Things^TM Framework:

1. Realizing that Context is Key to Next-Gen IoT, more intelligence is being pushed to edge devices to enable better decision-making. TCS leverages AWS IoT services to help extend the cloud capabilities of our customer solutions to edge devices. This also gives us the capability to locally compute and secure cloud connectivity so devices can respond quickly to local events even without internet connectivity. AWS Greengrass and IoT Core enable solution components to ‘Connect in Context’ “(first technical construct in TCS IoT Bringing Life to Things^TM framework) by providing managed compute endpoint capabilities, reduced latency, and higher availability.
2. Device data analytics is the key to unlocking meaningful insights from the data collected from IoT sensors. AWS IoT Analytics is helping us to strengthen the reliability and accuracy of that data during ingestion. Today, we are able to build, train and deploy machine learning models quickly and get to production faster and with much less effort. This leads the way for a far better operational model and provides a foundation for “Being Predictive” (second technical construct in TCS IoT Bringing Life to Things^TM framework).
3. As TCS continues to focus on integrating Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence into its products and services, and making the machines “Self-Aware “(third technical construct in TCS IoT Bringing Life to Things^TM framework), AWS has been a great partner. For bringing realistic life to things we use voice, image recognition, and cognitive tools. Amazon Polly, Textract and Comprehend are services which we leverage to augment human capabilities, enhance available data, and derive insights. Our aim is that the system becomes self-organizing, self-optimizing and self-healing with zero failures.

To maximize the business value of their IoT investments, organizations need to have clear strategies and a structured ‘Path to Value’ Roadmap. Learn how TCS can help you unlock exponential business value with this approach.

1.https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-08-29-gartner-says-5-8-billion-enterprise-and-automotive-io 2.https://www.tcs.com/perspectives/articles/bringing-life-to-things-a-framework-for-iot 3.https://www.tcs.com/tcs-launches-intelligent-power-plant-solution-to-digitally-transform-utilities-operations 4.https://sites.tcs.com/bts/internet-of-things/#iot-competency