Blogs

ICT, IoT, and Vapourware

Today’s world of digital convergence includes not just the merging of information and communications technology into ICT; the Internet of Things (IoT) is of course also part of the mix.

The continuing miniaturisation of electronics, compounded by the rise of the Internet then, later, data intensive smart phones, lies at the heart of this massive whirlpool, as companies in formerly separate and distinct industries find themselves competing with each other. Once upon a time, companies like AT&T, IBM, and Cisco viewed each other primarily as customers, not competitors.

Today, all three offer IoT platforms, in a world of nearly four hundred platforms. All three have committed significant resources to IoT. This is true for virtually all large ICT providers and extends, as well, into the domain of industrial automation and manufacturing, home of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with its giants – Siemens, G.E., Rockwell Automation, and so on, says Bill Ingle, senior analyst, Beecham Research.

Mergers and acquisitions are rampant, not infrequently including the acquisition of companies offering what were once called M2M platforms by much larger companies. A very few of the many examples include Cisco’s acquisition of Jasper Wireless, PTC’s acquisition of ThingWorx then Axeda, and Amazon’s acquisition of 2lemetry.

The situation impacts market research and analysis companies, as well. A research company known for its expertise in what was called IT must now also understand the telecommunications environment, even as telecommunications specialists are forced to incorporate a knowledge of IT, its players, market dynamics, etc.

A research company long focused on the industrial sector must now expand into new areas beyond its established purview. The situation is a bit different for an M2M-focused research firm.

The many verticals of M2M still exist while, if anything, cellular M2M is even more important in the larger IoT world; the emphasis on data analytics in IoT is a shift from a primary focus on remote monitoring and achieving operational efficiencies, but the underlying technologies — although still evolving — haven’t changed. No company can afford to eschew a cost-effective way to improve operational efficiency, either.

What’s very different in the research environment of such firms is the presence of huge IT and automation companies.

For a long time, an industrial automation analyst didn’t have to pay close attention to hardware and software companies in the IT space; a basic, general awareness was sufficient. Even less attention was required for telecommunications.

If, say, HP, Dell, and IBM were competing in personal computers, this was generally not of immediate concern. Some awareness of IT software offerings was relevant, to the extent that industrial systems were connected (hopefully) to what were once called management information systems (MIS); operating systems – particularly smaller versions that ran on single board computers – could not be ignored, either, as industrial variants of PCs began to appear in factories. Networking became very important, too, but industrial-specialised vendors tended to prevail.

In a similar way, an M2M analyst had no need to pay close attention to IT players. Vertical sectors tended to have their own M2M specialist firms, very different – usually much smaller — from large IT companies.

Early attempts to promote M2M platforms as horizontal in nature – applicable to any vertical application – generally weren’t successful. Instead, an M2M solution provider would gain expertise in one or, possibly, two sectors and had to, in order to survive and grow. Why would a large IT company be interested?

In time, telecoms began to focus on M2M as their handset businesses became saturated. A very few large IT firms began to make initial forays into M2M (one early example was Intel’s reference design for an M2M gateway powered by the ATOM chip; it didn’t succeed in the market – specialised M2M hardware firms, working with M2M cellular module companies, used much less expensive processors, while most of the suppliers in Intel’s ecosystem at the time were not selling products into the M2M market).

All of that has changed with ICT and IoT, for analysts of all persuasions.

One thing that automation and M2M analysts rarely had to deal with is much more common in the ICT space: Vapourware, which may seem like an alien intruder from the big IT space into the more cloistered worlds of specialists.

Very large IT companies may have marketing budgets larger than the annual revenue of smaller specialised industrial vendors and most M2M providers. An M2M company might have announced an offering in response to a similar offering by a competitor, but if a customer called, the odds were very high that this offering, even if at an early stage of development, actually existed.

The IT part of ITC has a long history of doing just the opposite, namely announcing imaginary products to keep up with their competitors, then – sometimes – actually cobbling together something resembling the announced product after the product announcement.

Keeping up with the current state of nearly four hundred IoT platforms (and, for whatever reason, new platforms continue to be announced even as existing platforms, designed for specific vertical sectors and unknown outside of them, are now marketed beyond them, appearing as if from nowhere) is not a trivial pursuit – imagine simply just reviewing nearly four hundred current (and frequently updated) webpages.

What’s lacking in the IoT platform space is any good analysis of the vapourware segment. Who is the market leader? How fast is the vapourware IoT platform market growing? Will vapourware IoT platform X soon overtake vapourware IoT platform Y? If so, when?

The author of this blog is Bill Ingle, senior analyst, Beecham Research

Comment on this article below or via Twitter @IoTGN