Partner Up - Speeding Up Scalability

The promise of IoT is real – companies that can affirm that are experiencing accelerated growth, harnessing big data to make better decisions with less gut feel involved and are seeing improved customer satisfaction. Choosing the right technology partner is a massive factor in an organisation’s overall IoT success in any given industry ranging from devices over telco and insurance to consumer and industrial. Thus, bring your friends or make new ones quickly. In addition to exploring the features and functionality you should consider when assessing different vendors, there are two key areas where platforms rise to the top over do-it-yourself or one-off solutions: Scalability: By providing the means to design solutions that are no longer one-off, IoT platforms create vast capacity within the organisation Speed-to-market: IoT platforms allow for real-time product, and customer and/or process data, thus providing the building blocks for innovation and growth The time to invest in IoT is now and the right technology platform will provide the connectivity, flexibility and scalability an organisation needs to stay successful and accelerate growth. 5G is coming and the race for 5G IoT solutions is on, but in the meantime here at Connect-In we keep building on Bluetooth 5 and our 4-year matured stack because we see it as essential to a working system to use what's available. When looking at the growing IoT space out there, from reading insights on LinkedIn, I get the feeling the business (or consumer) problem is often neglected and solutions are churned out for problems that are only defined after. Similarly, it can be tempting to create an isolated point solution as a proof of concept. At the same time, IoT projects barely see deployment because of the challenges inherent in demonstrating a business value justifying investment. It looks like we are at the stage where everyone just has to do a lot of scoping and experimenting and throwing products unto the market - and that's ok in a way. A recent paper (sorry, I can’t find the author) describes IoT as a natural evolution of the technology that supports the industrial enterprise, and predict it will impact almost every industry in the majority of countries around the world. I’d love to hear your opinion – as an organisation prepares to implement its IoT solution, should it invest in additional staff to build IoT solutions in-house or work with a partner that designs specific point solutions for its industry? Also, how does innovation accounting, i.e. the rigorous process of defining, empirically measuring and communicating the concrete innovation progress including customer retention and usage patterns (taken from Lean Start-Up) fit in?  Raj Sark and I will host a webcast discussing our view on IoT Platforms from a start-up point of view and look into how a company can gain a competitive advantage by using our own Xupo platform to build and commercialise IoT solutions. Stay tuned.