Who needs a new IoT Blog?

When I as a practitioner survey the current landscape of IoT I am surprised by the continuous state of 'infancy' of the IoT industry. Five years ago IoT was full of promise and hope and there was a lot of activity by critical components for creating this new industry - startups, established companies, semiconductor manufacturers, cloud services, new industrial devices and consumer products. Yes, IoT was ascending towards the top of Gartner's 'hype cycle' as research reports, consultants and conferences were touting the Internet of Things as the next new 'revolution' in high tech! Five years later the euphoria has disappeared and the 'wind seems to have gone out of the IoT sails'. During the last three years the IoT industry has been at a virtual stand-still (with a couple of key exceptions). What happened?

What happened is that reality set in - IoT was not just an extension of the Internet where any individual or business could set up a web site in a matter of days or weeks and have it reachable by any web browser in the world in a matter of minutes. Not only did IoT actually mean developing a product 'Thing -IoT Device' and have it connect reliably to the Internet, it also involved managing the data to and from each IoT device as well as managing all IoT devices associated with a company or application. A company wanting to introduce IoT into their business suddenly had to become knowledgeable in areas like connectivity and data management and start to manage thousands (hopefully leading to millions) of IoT devices connected to their IoT solution. It is as if they had to learn how to connect products and run small network operations centers and learn how to manage data and information, all at the same time. Very few companies had all these skills, and even if they had them, they were unaware that in order to successfully capitalize on IoT, they would not only have to invest in the initial development of IoT products, applications solutions and the associated service infrastructure to run the IoT business. They would also have an ongoing expense to operate the business. Add to this that few companies had all the knowledge and skills required, so they became dependent on a combination of suppliers, consultants and advisers - all who walked away when the sale was done or the engagement over.

Little wonder that IoT seems stalled in it's tracks for the last couple of years.

Differing from many other hyped businesses, I firmly believe that IoT will happen and truly become the next frontier of the Internet.

In my IoT insight blog (gnosis is the greek work for personal insight), I will share my personal insights about the evolving IoT business.

Mats Samuelsson
GM - IoTgnosis


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting started with IoT

It seems that IoT is easy to talk about but more difficult to do something about. So next time you hear “What can we do with IoT?” at the office, here are some ideas! IoT present a spectrum of opportunities for our business. We can augment our business, products and services with IoT or we can use IoT to transform our business. But regardless what we decide, we need to get started! Here are a couple of suggestions about getting started with IoT: Gain Knowledge: IoT is not difficult, but it has a lot of moving parts – Products/Things, Connectivity, IoT Cloud Computing AND Applications (lots of them). It is unlikely that you or your business has all the knowledge – but you have to have it in order to get started with IoT. Knowledge comes in many forms, especially in IoT. While you may not want to know anything about embedded systems and computing it is an essential part of IoT as are all the other parts. Find some good training or a good consultant or attend a seminar th
Read more

The Economic Value of IoT

Lost in the current blog and conference discussions about IoT is talk about the potential economic value of IoT. Like with most evolving technologies it takes a while for the true economic value to clearly appear so instead discussions abound about potentials and examples pulled from the real world or the imaginary world of conference rooms and offices. As most companies are very private about their detailed budgets and financial statements, real world examples have to be guessed or depend on public statements by corporations and individuals. Which leaves us with the imaginary world of opinion, exaggerated statements and outright hyperbole. The current IoT world is filled with a combination of experts, consultants, studies delivering a steady stream of exaggerated consulting reports (I love those press releases stating that so-and-so predicts the IoT market will be $X Trillion by 2025), opinion blogs (like this one?), papers and presentations created in conference rooms (four walls m
Read more

Towards the $/Year Mobile IoT Connectivity Solution

In the ongoing and ever changing Internet of Things Battle for Connectivity different options gain and loose importance as technologies and deployments change. No convergence on 'connectivity' standards yet to be seen but the field is evolving. One of the unknowns is what final role mobile will eventually play and 'an expected' battle between the world's established mobile carriers using methods like 2G Data and NB-IoT and newcomers like LoRaWAN and sigfox . At a recent IoT gathering I had the opportunity to listen and talk to Michael Orr, sigfox VP Sales/Partners in North American who describe the exciting roll out of sigfox network in the US where they now cover about 20% of the populated areas with their solutions. Worldwide sigfox has partner network covering 100's of devices and chip support from Texas Instrument, Silicon Labs and ON Semiconductors. Needless to say, we are talking about very low data rates and 140/4 uplink/downlink messages per da
Read more