Published on the 01/09/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Considerable opportunities beckon, apparently…
Accounting and consulting firm KPMG has announced that its first dedicated IoT practice has been established in Australia focused initially on smart cities, smart campuses and smart farming. While a small team of four is kicking off the dedicated unit, there are ambitions to grow that to 30 in the next two years, while the team can draw on support from across KPMG in the meantime.
Led by Piers Hogarth-Scott, the new business unit will provide a range of services including smart city consulting, modelling business cases and return on investment forecasts for IoT deployments, creating appropriate security frameworks, and developing data and analytics platforms that leverage IoT information to improve decision making.
It’s a fast growing market – though exactly how fast remains moot.
KPMG predicts that the IoT will deliver 50 billion devices and have a US$11 trillion annual impact to the global economy by 2025.
According to Cisco research there will be 219 million networked devices installed in Australia by 2019. It seems a little on the low side given that Telsyte has this week suggested that by 2020 every single Australian home will have 29 network connected things and Gartner’s predicting that by 2020 1 million new connected things will come online globally every hour.
KPMG’s not waiting to see which forecast is right. According to Hogarth-Scott the organisation has been active in IoT projects over the last year and determined that such was the level of activity in the area it warranted setting up a dedicated business unit. The biggest area of work currently is in smart cities in projects Hogarth-Scott said were designed to make cities more “liveable, workable and sustainable”.
Similar impacts would be felt across university campuses which he said were microcosms of cities, while the agricultural sector he said was “Ripe for digital disruption; harnessing opportunities for IoT to drive precision farming to deliver operational efficiencies to decrease costs and increase yields.”
Overall he believes that IoT solutions could add more than $120 billion in economic activity for Australia, adding that he was seeing a “bow wave” of IoT activity across Australia, and that initiatives such as the IoT Alliance was a signal that it was an opportune time for KPMG to set up a special business unit with a “laser” focus on IoT projects.
According to Ian Hancock, head of management consulting at KPMG Australia, IoT has the capacity to; “Transform industries, and reshape how we interact with technology. For clients it represents both a massive opportunity, but also a risk as IoT developments shine a spotlight on security, privacy and trust.”
