By: Chitrang Negi, Senior Business Analyst, LTIMindtree

Advances in digital technologies such as 5G and IoT and rapid urbanization have made smart space technologies part of everyday life. We are now getting used to systems like intelligent waste management, smart street lighting, traffic management, and digital workplaces, all of which use connectivity and data to give us better experiences.

According to a report by Commscope, by 2050, 68% of the world’s 9.8 billion population will be urban dwellers. As the world population continues to grow and a substantial portion of it begins to dwell in urban areas, it is not hard to predict that digital tools and technologies will be the foundation for building innovative and sustainable infrastructure solutions that efficiently harness data, energy, space, and budgets.

Digital technologies enable the creation of smart spaces, which are physical environments infused with technology. Smart spaces are an emerging technology that combines modern technologies like sensors, high-speed internet, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Internet of Things (IoT) platforms to create a more dynamic and intelligent environment. Examples of smart spaces include smart cities, smart homes, and smart factories. Smart spaces present tremendous business opportunities for System Integrators (SIs) and service providers as companies look to incorporate this technology. Delivery leads at SIs would play a key role in helping their clients identify and determine the viability of projects implementing these solutions.

Forrester suggests that companies are investing heavily in smart spaces and expect smart infrastructure investments to increase by 40%. A part of it would be attributed to large government spending on smart infrastructure in China, Europe, and the US.

Smart spaces enable business owners and managers to make decisions and establish strategies to improve operational efficiency, safety measures, and the general user experience. It can also help track demand patterns and business trends, leading to better business results and, thus, improved financials.

With all its potential applications, the smart spaces technology market is projected to increase at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.2% from 2022-2032, as per an analysis done by Future Market Insights (FMI). The market is expected to reach a valuation of USD 53.6 billion by the end of 2032.

Use cases of smart spaces

Organizations across the globe want to transform their buildings, factories, and business estates and create one intelligent and smart campus that offers better safety standards and promotes better utilization of resources. Smart space technologies can make this vision a reality.

Smart space solutions are expected to have a wide range of applications in offices, homes, factories, and cities. Some of these are discussed below:

• Manufacturing – Smart spaces help businesses streamline processes, data collection, and data analysis so that workers can take up more creative and innovative tasks. In a factory setting, the physical production processes and operations are combined with technology such as IIoT, embedded sensors, improved connectivity, automation, and machine learning. The technology infusion gives factory workers real-time data and in-depth information in real-time, which aids in speeding up crucial decisions, making processes efficient, and saving both time and money. They also extend to improving safety through alert sensors and environmental benefits like reduced carbon footprint through efficient energy consumption.
• Retail – Retailers may improve the customer experience by creating digital twins of consumer profiles as they enter the smart space environment of the store. They can give clients better product recommendations based on the digital models generated.
  Smart spaces technology allows retailers to analyze the footfall pattern of consumers. Retailers may use smart tech like digital twins to spot bottlenecks, supply shortages, and sudden increases in demand, and take actions such as restocking items, repositioning products, and generating targeted advertisements to reduce waste and increase sales.
• Healthcare and safety – Smart technology can be used in hospital rooms to view the state of the patients, resulting in more efficient and less intrusive patient care on the part of caregivers. Smart hospitals would enable cognitive patient care, which would provide constant monitoring of the patients and instant alerts in case of a change in the situation. A smarter room could provide voice activation, one-click doctor recall, automatic light, temperature, humidity, angle of the bed control, and so much more.
  The global pandemic has brought a renewed focus on healthcare and the well-being of occupants of a building. Property owners are looking for solutions to address concerns, such as increasing purified air flow, disinfecting work areas, optimizing lighting solutions, and increasing access to outdoor spaces. Smart spaces technology helps address these concerns, for example, IoT-enabled HVAC systems can be used to analyze air quality and formulate an action plan, track progress, and, assess mitigation effectiveness.
• Logistics and transportation – Smart spaces can help businesses create digital twins of their physical supply networks. The solution consolidates data from various sources and provides a comprehensive and clear picture of logistics operations, a technique that can open the door for significantly faster data analysis.

How can system integrators help enterprises get started with smart spaces?

Businesses across industry verticals are enthusiastic and showing significant interest in the potential for smart spaces. Smart space would be a huge opportunity for SIs as they will play a vital role in the integration of these solutions into an enterprise’s current system architecture.

SIs can help enterprises recognize their needs by evaluating the challenges in their current real estate and providing guidance on the best smart space solutions to meet them.

The next step is to determine which use cases would be most advantageous to the enterprises. Use cases range from enhancing comfort and security, consequently increasing productivity, and increasing energy efficiency, to offering services proactively like maintenance and repair and anticipating employee needs.

SIs can establish a Proof of Concept (POC) with restricted deployment to identify the scope, scale, and applicability, while also charting the risks. Subsequently, they can grow the solution for full implementation. SI’s capabilities will be essential in the data collection, processing, and platform upkeep of the smart space, where a strong partner ecosystem, like cloud providers, can be of great help to enterprises as they consolidate sensor data, deliver information in real-time, and enable mapping and building navigation. Expertise in IoT and cloud/on-premises data center infrastructure would also be equally valuable to enterprises.

SIs with capability in AI/ML can enable intelligent automation and decision-making, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to enable natural language interaction with devices and systems. For example, SI’s NLP capabilities can be used to enable voice commands for controlling lighting and temperature in a smart factory or smart home.

In case of system failures, SIs can offer incident and emergency management and create a framework for standard operations, and those with extensive experience in data analytics can provide effective decision-making support and performance of the systems.

SIs can also play an important role in capability building by training the enterprise’s staff on how to use and manage smart space solutions. They can also help the enterprise to ensure that smart space solutions are secure and that any sensitive data collected by the solutions is protected.

Conclusion

Companies, big or small, would equally benefit from the smart spaces technology. Smart spaces connect people, improve the facility and operational control, support digital collaboration, and help business owners conserve resources like space, energy, and water.

SIs can help enterprises get started in smart space technology. They can work with them to evaluate their goals, whether they want to improve their employee productivity and health or if it is the sustainability angle. They would play a key role in successfully implementing smart space solutions for enterprises. Their expertise in areas such as integration, deployment, support, and security can help to ensure that enterprises get the most out of their smart space investments.