Amazon or Netscape strategy?

Last week, I attended the Industrial Internet Consortium’s (IIC) member meeting in Reston, VA. This gave me an opportunity to talk to executives from several companies about their IoT market objectives. In the prior week, I interviewed a C-level executive from an IoT infrastructure services provider on the same topic.

What struck me in all these discussions was the competitive tension between short-term and strategic IoT planning. The C-level executive put it best when he described how many of his clients’ sales plans for the coming year are based on implementing bespoke solutions; it’s a quick way to get to market. Where this model breaks down is when companies are implementing their third or fourth IoT applications.

IoT Roaming

The mobile industry and users of its services are very familiar with the concept of roaming. Roaming allows users to access mobile services outside their home-operator’s footprint. Most users are familiar with roaming in the context of foreign travel. Roaming also occurs when users cannot access their service provider network at home and need to ‘roam’ onto other, local service-provider networks.

M2M service providers and IoT technology developers are now beginning to think about new service scenarios where ‘foreign’ devices enter a local operating environment; I have been using the term ‘IoT roaming’ to describe this situation. There are several reasons why IoT roaming is important, and different compared to traditional ‘roaming’. This is because IoT applications need the ability to recognize and inter-operate with roaming devices. There are knock-on implications for service provider business models and the platform capabilities needed to support IoT applications.

IoT Product Development - Planning Strategically

The IoT (Internet of Things) has been hugely popularized by companies, such as ARM, Bosch, Cisco, GE and Intel. Their marketing campaigns speak of new and massive business opportunities along with their respective IoT market offers. So what do users of such offers need to know in order to manage their IoT product development plans strategically?

PTC-ThingWorx dual-aggregation business model

I was recently in discussion with an executive from an M2M service provider who was marveling at the sizable sum - $112m plus a possible earn-out of $18m - for which ThingWorx was acquired by PTC.

By way of context, PTC supplies software and service solutions to discrete manufacturing organizations to help them create and service their products; example products include heavy machinery, medical devices, air-handling and fire-protection systems. While PTC has been in business for over 25 years, ThingWorx was established as recently as 2010. Its aim was to create a platform to speed up the process of developing applications for smart, connected services involving people, systems and devices.

The acquisition should not come as a surprise to readers of this site. The pattern of corporate initiatives in the connected devices market and the rising role of end-user companies were anticipated at the end of 2012.