The pandemic has not just changed the way people live their daily lives but has changed the way they depend on technology, according to Suhail Khan, director of engineering at Huawei, in his keynote address to this week’s IoT Tech Expo in London.

He said the world was going through a digital transformation with the likes of contactless payments and working from home.

“Homes are no longer just a place where you eat, sleep and live, but are a network of intelligent devices,” he said. “We are seeing devices that are secure, connected and intelligent.”

However, there is a snag, and that is the IoT infrastructure is not there yet because the increase in the number of IoT devices has been so rapid. This has led to a fragmented market with multiple operating systems and standards.

“This has led to a poor user experience,” he said. “Connecting two devices together and making sure they work together is a challenge.”

This, he said, was the reason behind Huawei launching its Harmony operating system that is designed to connect multiple IoT devices together.

“This all started with our smartphones,” he said. “We went from being a smartphone vendor to a multiple device vendor to an infrastructure provider.”

He said Harmony OS was now running on more than 50 million devices and more devices were being added to the ecosystem.

“The journey to get here was not something we did overnight,” he said. “We want to connect multiple devices together and make them work, but that has always been complex. There were multiple edge cases we had to deal with, but we have made the journey to the IoT simpler for the end user. You can now put your phone near an IoT device and it will connect automatically; the user does not even have to download an app.”

The real intelligence, he said, came when you connected two devices together.

“We ensure all devices are speaking in a common language,” he said. “Harmony OS groups all the devices to make them look like one device. It is meant for IoT devices large and small. And this is being done in an open-source way.”

This he said meant designers did not have to worry about the underlying hardware when developing their software.

“You can develop it once and it will run on multiple devices,” he said.

• Digital transformation is the new way to do business, said Andrew Buss, a research director at IDC, as he opened the second day of the event.

He described digital transformation as something that had been happening inexorably for the past decade. And he said companies needed to be agile and flexible in the way they responded to changes.

He predicted that 65% of the global GDP would be digitised by 2022.

“The more companies invest in digital, the more they grow,” he said. “It is happening in just about every industry, even the slow-moving ones. And they are investing across a whole range of technologies.”

Nearly half (49%) of organisation in Europe have deployed some IoT technology, he said, with 77% planning investments. Only one per cent are pushing back and have decided against IoT.

Companies that have already started on this path will have an advantage, and he advised other to start, and thus start to catch up.

As an example of the type of flexibility needed, he looked at Uber, which he said before the pandemic was primarily a taxi company and was now mainly a food delivery company.