Why IoT needs to get back to basics
Theresa Bui, Cisco Jasper
The meteoric rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has been well documented, writes Theresa Bui, the head of enterprise product marketing at Cisco Jasper.
The reasons behind this growth are easily understood: through its ability to improve the customer experience and provide operational efficiencies and analytics that make it easier to make cost savings and improve understanding of what is happening in a business, IoT has the power to deliver an always on connection between companies and their customers. This is transformational for businesses because it enables them to provide new customer services that in turn create new sources of recurring revenue.
The business benefits of IoT make it a highly competitive space, and IoT’s success has led to a point where the term IoT platform has been co-opted by everyone trying to enter the IoT solutions market. This is far from helpful as it muddies the waters for enterprises, manufacturers and consumers as to what IoT is really all about, how it can be utilized and what the benefits are to their organisations.
Although it’s great to see lots of choice in the market, with so many new IoT market entrants it is important to have clear differentiation. Providers need to demonstrate to enterprises exactly what problem their IoT platform solves so that potential customers can clearly see from the terminology that solution A is an IoT Application Enablement Platform that does X and solution B an IoT Services Platform that can help with Y.
In order to be able to understand and evaluate the real-world benefits of each of the different IoT solutions, we need vendors to get back to basics and name their platforms in a way that honestly reflects what it actually does.
Which IoT platform is right for you?
There are around 300 plus so-called IoT platforms available, many with different capabilities that solve different needs. Here’s a breakdown:
- Connectivity management platforms manage the connectivity between devices. Vendors are usually major mobile carrier networks and the focus is on provisioning data services and rate plans as well as usage and performance monitoring.
- Device management platforms enable remote configuration and management of device settings, status monitoring and device issue resolution. Vendors include companies like Cradlepoint, Mobile Iron and Monnit.
- Application enablement platforms collect and analyse collected data from devices to help developers to build new mobile software applications. Vendors include companies like Oracle, CA and SAP, AppDynamics, New Relic, and Ruxit.
- IoT services platforms enable businesses to leverage their connected devices to launch IoT-based services and then manage and monetise these new services. By providing visibility and real-time control, businesses can provision, engage with customers in real time, provide remote support diagnostics and automate billing. Solutions like these are offered by Cisco Jasper and our partners including IBM, Microsoft, and SAP.
What to look for
IoT drives the connecting, monitoring and gathering of data from billions of physical objects, and this capability brings huge business opportunities – as well as huge operational challenges. Once you have chosen an IoT solution, you need to understand ongoing costs and savings, potential revenue from new service offerings and the time it will take to achieve ROI. The most proficient IoT service management partners will show you how to reap the benefits and add considerable value to your business. For more information, check out this whitepaper on the best practices for deploying IoT.