Edward Lorenz, 20th century world renowned mathematician, produced an intriguing mathematical paper, which became the foundation stone of chaos theory, which essentially deals with the gigantic effect of any tiny events happening at one place and time, influencing others happening at different places, even far away from them and even in different time. Lorenz were working for the mathematical formulation for the prediction of weather conditions when he developed his idea. Lorenz could not find the right title for his paper to express his concept and has given a metaphorical name to his paper stating “a butterfly flutter its wings at brazil and a tornado is formed at texas”. This concept had got disseminated with the notion of "butterfly effect" and was tough to be conceived, as in the way that in the happening of any event everything matters at various places and at various time in various intensity and impact.
Alluding (taking help from wiki) on this not easily conceivable concept that had not remained free from criticism and sarcastic comments, like one of such was that if theory is accepted so there should be a remarkable change in the course of weather track by a flap of sea gull’s wings. This putted the whole thing into a controversial theme, but as Wikipedia points that the most recent proves on this falls in favour to seagull and no doubts chaos theory is a well-established mathematical discipline.
Coming to the point the IOT is all about the butterflies fluttering everywhere with the notion of everything connected and yielding a tornado - the Bigdata.
As we are moving towards the development of next generation communication systems capable of connecting millions of devices per unit of geo region and having a ubiquitous connectivity across the globe. These systems which are going to generate data, attributed to various applications running on them. This data is of value for creating tremendous business opportunities for us.
No doubt the upcoming technological advancement on connectivity, networking and computing has been of capability to cater all the requirement for such IOT need, and even if not available handy today the new advancement will achieve it.
But nothing less to say here that the success of all IOT stories are on the anvils of big data, cause that’s where application and business cases would be shaped. This is actually where to deal with the tornado, tornado could be of any form, small or big, but most probably as much as bigger the tornado is the more and more impact the IOT will bring.
As people are talking on new industrial revolution and coining it with a number sequence "industry 4.0". Hope the chaos theory will be helping there.