Jan 7, 2017

2016 in Review: Shift in Industry Dynamics as the IoT Enters the Mainstream

According to my records, the strength of IoT corporate initiatives witnessed over previous years weakened in 2016, somewhat in contrast to the much greater visibility of the IoT at industry events and in the marketing literature.

While the number of merger, acquisition and investment (MA&I) fell compared to 2015, as a proportion of all corporate events it increased over the prior years.

About 70% of these relate to acquisitions; the remainder correspond to fundraising or investment activities.

Now that the IoT market has become a mainstream idea across the wider economy, the MA&I dynamic reveals a stronger tendency for companies to accelerate their IoT strategies by acquiring capabilities from third parties.

Dec 29, 2016

Industrial IoT Strategy

The combined activities of the Industrial Internet Consortium and Industrie4.0 alliance, culminating in the much expanded IoT Solutions World Congress in October seem to have given significant impetus to IoT adoption in the industrial sector. In several of my discussions over Q4-2016, I witnessed growing evidence that corporate executives have tasked their business development and strategy teams to formulate plans to integrate IoT more closely into their core operations.

The IoT takes most industrial organizations into a new operating domain and requires a process of self-education to begin with. Most of the questions I encountered began around the two topics of connectivity technology choices and approaches to justify the IoT business case.

Nov 29, 2016

Mass-market data monetization

The motivation for this article comes from several recent and groundbreaking announcements relating to the commercialization of consumer data. In one of these, Proximus [1] launched myAnalytics, a service that sells aggregated customer data as a ‘market research’ service for businesses such as tourism agencies, event organizers, marketers and those in charge of mobility management.

Telefonica, one of the larger communications service providers, announced plans to create a personal data bank for each of its 350m customers [2]. This will allow customers the means of storing, managing and selling their own data. When questioned about Telefonica’s plans, Vodafone’s CEO expressed puzzlement as to whether this is any different from everyday protection of customer data [3]. This reaction should set a few alarm bells ringing.

Nov 2, 2016

Impressions from IoT Solutions World Congress 2016

While I often attend Mobile World Congress in Barcelona during February, this was my first experience of IoTSW Congress and seeing Barcelona in October. The show is growing impressively, doubling the number of exhibitors and attendees compared to 2015. If this pace holds up, IoTSWC could surpass MWC within three years, such is the growth potential for the IoT industry.

 In addition to three speaking slots – one for the Industrial Internet Consortium, another for Intel’s Corporate Strategy group and a third on main Congress track - I had several discussions with industrial businesses, investors and solution providers about the state of the market.

Here are a few observations that stood out from the event. 

Oct 5, 2016

SK Telecom’s IoT strategy looks beyond Connected Devices

Over the summer, Korea’s SK Telecom outlined its strategy to capitalize on the IoT opportunity. From a networking standpoint, SK Telecom has invested in a nationwide LoRa network. It plans to offer a hybrid offering in parallel with LTE-M over its conventional mobile network. This combination allows SK Telecom to span a wider spectrum of coverage and cost-structure alternatives. Its technology choices use licensed and unlicensed spectrum, support differing data-rates, and, offer a broad range of embedded module costs to deal with barriers to adoption in low price-point (or low perceived value) devices.

Sep 14, 2016

IoT Reference Design Framework

The IoT industry seems deeply preoccupied over ideas for IoT reference architectures, cloud-based platforms and edge computing technologies. However, before solution designers leap to the latest flavor of technology, it is worth stepping back to reflect on the characteristics of an IoT application or, more realistically, a group of interoperable applications and then to translate these into a set of logical requirements.

The next step is to map these logical requirements into a physical architecture, which entails a process of design, performance and cost trade-offs, to select suitable technical solutions. This approach avoids the pitfalls of working back from any given technology and positing it as the solution to all IoT problems.

Aug 2, 2016

Comparative advantage in IoT standardization

Last year, I wrote a post about the landscape of standards development organizations, industry-alliances and company consortia [1]. Several recent developments have led me to revisit the topic. There are signs that the IoT market is maturing. Users and service providers are well beyond the first hurdle of understanding a new capability and set of enabling technologies. And, businesses are exploring the longer-term road map for IoT solutions and the underlying enablers they will need.

Nigel Upton, Worldwide Director and GM IoT/GCP at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HP-E) encapsulated the issue, from a business standpoint, in a recent conference presentation [2]. He advised companies that they could simplify their IoT strategies by using a common platform, a common data model and an IoT standard. It so happens that HP-E chose oneM2M, viewing it as the best supported standard on offer.