By Oliver Hutaff
CFO/COO
Electric Imp
Many businesses are already using the IoT to transform their products and services. They demonstrate that innovation continues to reduce the overall cost and complexity of developing connected devices, while showing strong benefits. This leads us to believe 2018 will be a decisive year for IoT deployments. This post is the first of a three-part series exploring the major trends that will help customers realize the true power and benefits of real-time IoT connectivity.
Strong Partnerships Will Support IoT Success in 2018
Although IoT adoption continues to accelerate, we haven’t seen stellar rates of acceptance — especially in the industrial and automation industries, where the IoT has the potential to make the most impact.
This could be due to the obvious lack of robust, integrated and complete solution offerings. The roadmap to get data from the edge to the cloud and drive valuable business insights is still a very rocky road for a manufacturer. This makes it difficult for customers to find a trusted resource to aid in the efficient and secure development and deployment of connected devices to support intelligent, data driven insights.
For the IoT to succeed in 2018, it is vital that customers can rely on an ecosystem of partners to deliver a complete solution that ‘just works’ without the need to completely overhaul enterprise software or infrastructure.
To make this possible, industry partners should work together to develop solution packages encompassing all necessary devices, cloud storage and computing, analytics and applications, integration and lifecycle management products and services.
That said, there are organizations out there building stronger partner ecosystems that can help simplify the industry’s current development, deployment and lifecycle management pains.
Industry Organizations are Leading the Charge
From an organizational standpoint, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) is leading the charge to unite some of the world’s leading industrial IoT organizations to help remove the roadblocks preventing widespread adoption.
The IIC has created an ecosystem to promote thought leadership and real-world test-beds that members can leverage to reduce the risk and complexity of future projects. This approach could prove extremely valuable if expanded outside of industrial applications to help the commercial market revolutionize legacy technology.
The Cards are in Our Hands
Not only is the IoT a crowded space, it is difficult for customers to determine where to begin when building a connected solution, let alone tackle a project from start to finish. It isn’t the technology that needs to evolve, it’s the digital business models behind the IoT, especially as deployments at massive scale become major business assets that change the way organizations operate.
Strong partner ecosystems have the potential to ease and simplify every step of the IoT journey for manufacturers, and through them many industries will finally realize the true power of real-time connectivity. We have the opportunity to achieve the reality of a completely connected world and all the benefits that come from it, but now it is most important that as an industry, we move to offering more complete solutions as opposed to individual pieces of a solution that a customer has to piece together and maintain over time.
Click here to view an infographic on the five traits of secure IoT success.