IoT, Big Data, Cloud Computing are One Trend Pointing to Next Era of Computing

It increasingly is going to be hard to separate the Internet of Things from cloud computing from big data, since the value of all those sensors and apps will be the ability to pluck trends and meaning from a bewildering amount of raw sensor data.

Think about Waze, the social driving app that crowd sources the observations of drivers about traffic, for example.

The sensors now are smartphones, but the value is the insight about traffic slowdowns and jams. That requires use of sensors (smartphones as the “things,” in this case), the global positioning satellite system, the Waze and Google Maps apps, the cloud computing infrastructure and the ability to process tons of data in real time.

If you wanted to start looking for leaders in the next era of computing, you would do much worse than to look for firms that will dominate the horizontal roles in IoT-centric computing.