May 10, 2021
Hyperscalers and IoT Market Prospects
Feb 11, 2021
IoT Platforms and Digital Regulation
A couple of recent and seemingly unconnected publications provide food for strategic thought on the topic of IoT platforms.
Platforms are an important topic for the following reasons. As businesses deploy Internet of Things applications, many will turn to the service provider market for affordable, feature-rich, and well-engineered platforms. Platforms also represent an important topic for the large Cloud-providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, who understand the importance of platform strategies and data.The first publication that caught my attention is a short article on the IoT Agenda site. It outlines that issues of IoT technology fragmentation and discusses the trend towards concentration in the IoT platform market [1]. The second is a study by a group of economists with an expertise in platform economics and competition policy. They studied the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and its regulatory implications for large and dominant digital platforms [2].
Jan 8, 2021
2020 in Review: Corporates Adapt Their IoT Business Models
This review of 2020 corporate initiatives in the IoT market builds on a history of tracking strategic industry developments for over a decade. Two sets of corporate events that bookended the start and end of 2020 provide instructive examples of the roadmap and dead ends that characterize today’s IoT market. In the intervening months, organizations in different parts of the industry ecosystem bolstered their IoT strategies. Some developed complementary capabilities through M&A while others addressed go-to-market issues through business reorganization and product-innovation initiatives. For many organizations, however, there remain challenges in balancing short term imperatives with strategic positioning goals. There is a degree of comfort in embracing the familiar. The risk is that this leads to an under-investment in properly integrating new business approaches and complementary technologies.