Rumble in the IoT Jungle

I recently participated in a debate, hosted by the IEEE Communications Society, about the pros and cons of IoT standardization. My debating counterpart was the North Americas President of SigFox, a company that has so far raised over US$150m. SigFox is in the process of deploying its proprietary networking technology in 18 countries specifically for the purpose of energy-efficient and low-cost IoT applications.

Much of the debate and several of the audience questions focused on the worry about standards proliferation in the IoT market. This creates a confusing picture for business that have to make long-term product development decisions. My observations on the issue of IoT standardization were fourfold.

Lessons from IoT Week Korea

I had the good fortune to attend IoT Week Korea 2015 in Seoul during the week of 26-30 October. This was a great opportunity to check in on Korea’s 2014, IoT Master Plan [1] and gauge how this leading edge country is mastering the IoT opportunity.

It was interesting to note that the corporate sponsors for this event were SK Telecom and PTC (owner of ThingWorx). PTC, of course, has made strategic and investment commitments to capitalize on what it views as a significant market opportunity.

There were two parts to the event – a sizable display zone and a full-day conference with four parallel sessions focusing on key technologies and solutions. 

IoT alliances and interoperability

I have recently been consulting on the topic of IoT Platform strategy with a particular focus on the recently issued oneM2M standard. As part of this work, I researched the activities of different IoT alliances and industry groups because there is a lot of industry discussion about competing standards.

In discussions with company executives, a recurring theme is that nobody wants to take a bet on any single ‘standards’ approach. As a result, many companies choose to hedge their bets and participate in multiple initiatives. Having examined several of the leading initiatives from different dimensions, it’s debatable whether companies are getting a strategic, product-development return on their participation (setting aside brand-building and corporate networking benefits).

There are many different ways to look at each of initiatives. For this post, let’s begin by concentrating on their mission and primary objectives.

Roadmap for IoT strategy

Over the past few weeks, there have been several industry conferences, magazine articles and webinars dealing with the IoT market opportunity and the role of different companies across the eco-system. The topics addressed in these events have generally highlighted M2M use cases (vertical-specific applications) and the promising role for telecoms operators.

In many respects, the subjects under discussion have been disappointing. They indicate that many parts of the industry are still coming up the M2M learning curve and some way off dealing with the commercial implications of the IoT market. In terms of the competitive landscape that is forming around the IoT, company executives who are coming to terms with M2M are not yet in a position to plan sustainable IoT strategies.

So, how do you tell if your organization is working with an M2M mind-set and whether it has embarked on the transition from M2M to IoT?

What do we know about IoT developers?

A couple reports published in recent weeks have touched on the topic of the IoT developer community. The first one, from Vision Mobile [1], is entitled IoT Megatrends 2015. Based on research involving over 4,000 IoT developers, Vision Mobile identifies four seismic changes that will shake up the IoT market; one of these changes is that 'everyone can become a developer'.

According to Vision Mobile, this development is quite likely to occur in the consumer portion of the IoT market. This is because IoT platforms, such as Pebble, Razer, Android Wear and Apple WatchKit in the smart-watch segment for example, will evolve in ways that allow developers to orchestrate data streams into valuable scenarios for users. Soon, the ability to manipulate data streams will become so easy that everyone can become a ‘developer’. Or, to use a term that I introduced in an earlier post [2], we should expect a data 'taker' class of user to emerge, paralleling the ‘makers’ of the hardware world.

The second IoT developer survey comes from the Eclipse Foundation [3] and this draws on a small (about a tenth of the Vision Mobile sample) sample of real IoT developers (Eclipse eliminated respondents who did not meet its criteria for IoT developers).

The study author admits to a skewed sample base because of factors such as the channels used to recruit participants. Nevertheless, amongst details about the most popular programming languages, protocols and use of open-source technology there was a surprising revelation about the highly visible industry alliances that are evangelizing interoperability and the IoT market.