Solving Real Business Problems

There is virtually no industry that won't be disrupted by IoT solutions if it hasn't already happened. Of course, that doesn't make it easier, as everyone is rushing to catch the boat, and as an organisation prepares to implement IoT, knowing where to start can be puzzling.

You may ask yourself if you should invest in additional staff to build IoT solutions in-house? Maybe work with a 3rd party that designs specific point solutions for your industry? Should you consider a more robust IoT platform?

I've been asked for my views on the current IoT landscape and how platforms are the best solutions for organisations that want to implement a scalable IoT framework that can support current and mid-term initiatives.This is

a larger topic and I'm thinking of splitting it up over a few weeks.

According to IDC, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a natural evolution of the technology that supports the industrial enterprise. In fact, they predict it will impact almost every industry in the majority of countries around the world. PTC forecasts that by 2021, 20% of midsize to large enterprises will deploy an enterprise-wide IoT plan, jumping up from 5% in 2017.

Already, an increasing number of organisations can attest that the promise of IoT is real – they are experiencing accelerated growth, mining big data to making better informed decisions and are seeing improved customer satisfaction.

When it comes to IoT projects, because it’s still quite early on and there is so much progress and you need to stay agile, choosing the right technology partner is a huge factor in your overall IoT success. 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 tremendous capacity within an organisation

• Speed-to-market: IoT platforms enable organisations to collect and interact with sales, product, and customer data in real-time, providing the building blocks for innovation and growth

Now is the time to invest in IoT. The right technology platform will provide the connectivity, flexibility and scalability that your business needs to stay successful and accelerate growth.

When you’re getting started in IoT, you might feel tempted to create an isolated point solution as a proof of concept. However, many of these projects never get deployed because of the challenges inherent in demonstrating a business value large enough to justify an investment.

By implementing an IoT framework that can scale to support a number of strategic business objectives, organisations set themselves up for long-term success. Gartner highlights a simple three stage approach for creating and implementing an IoT framework (Gartner, 2018: IoT: Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast):

• Creating your vision: This step is about identifying and supporting business goals and strategies – not technology, that comes second

• Assessing Maturity Level: From a business and technology perspective, determine if your organisation is ready to deploy IoT solutions

• Prioritising Solution Rollout: Define the adequate set of solutions and KPIs to align with business benefits

It's all about the build-measure-learn approach and by taking the above steps, an organisation's resulting IoT framework will facilitate and measure business objectives and success criteria in terms that can be understood across business, IT and operational technology groups.

Over the years, we have been building the Xupo innovation platform, to make it easy to develop and implement powerful Bluetooth 5 IoT solutions that provide transformative business value to us and our partners, with the aim to:

• Quickly connect devices or sensors to start building an IoT ecosystem using the Xupo SDK

• Operationalise powerful analytics using our cloud backend and console, pushing time-critical insights and actions to where it matters

• Build and deploy IoT ready solutions with efficient app development tools

• Extend existing solutions with a powerful platform.

Things to build include personal alarm buttons, proximity and location as a service, medical applications, use cases in warehousing and security, social housing, public services etc, integrating the smartphone as IoT gateway and with devices communicating among each other.