Most importantly, GE is creating a way for other companies to harness the power of its big data platform — known as Predix — and deploy their own solutions, which could help smaller companies cut costs and scale with ease. Major players like Cisco and Intel have already agreed to integrate their own technologies with GE, amplifying Predix’s potential for data collection.

Embrace The IoT Life

The unintended creation of silos is arguably one of the biggest risks in embracing the IoT if a business doesn’t have the right systems to capture, correlate, and analyze every input from the same interface. But most BI tools won’t be able to handle this because the old data delivery paradigm is done through reports — there’s too much information to report on any longer, so we have to shift the paradigm. The answer is not to create more reports; it’s to handle the consumption of information in a meaningful way, and that means putting data in the hands of regular business users.

With all it has to offer, the time to embrace the IoT isn’t some distant point in the future — it’s now. The question is no longer “Should I adopt the IoT?” Rather, it’s “How can I make sure my data systems are ready to handle it?”

Marius Moscovici is the founder and CEO of Metric Insights.