You need to go one level up and look at the economic situation.
There are a lot of companies that can benefit from IoT tech, but there's this nagging little problem of the cloud layer in the middle.
Let's take the example of a fast-food chain that wants to have all of their refrigerators upload their current temperatures to a central point. (This might or might not be related to something I'm working on) Seems like a simple little technical problem for the refrigerator manufacturer, right? At the physical layer, it totally is. We can drop wifi points and 802.11b radios all over the globe and we're in business. The restaurant chain is happy - the equipment vendor has handled it all and we're on our way.
But now all that data is coming into a server somewhere. And the questions start piling up:
1) Who owns that server? The restaurant chain or the fridge maker? Is the data proprietary?
2) Who is paying for the server maintenance? Who's paying for the broadband connections in every store?
3) Who is going to write the dashboard that lets corp see the nifty graphics about system uptime? Who maintains that? Where does it live?
So should the fridge maker switch to a subscription model and rent out the units? That'll take care of the cost. But if the restaurant is renting the units, then surely the fridge maker should be on 24/7 call to service these units when they fail! Oops, now the fridge maker needs to implement a service team.
This is a holy mess. There are plenty of middlemen popping up to handle the cloud layer like Digi and Exosite. But in the end someone has to write the check and neither side wants to do it. The restaurant wants their food safety data without the added cost. The fridge maker wants to sell units and minimize the support cost.
Companies like Amazon are in a much better position because that Dash button feeds directly into their ecosystem. For the rest of the world, the world that IoT is trying to target, they're still out in the cold.
There are a lot of companies that can benefit from IoT tech, but there's this nagging little problem of the cloud layer in the middle.
Let's take the example of a fast-food chain that wants to have all of their refrigerators upload their current temperatures to a central point. (This might or might not be related to something I'm working on) Seems like a simple little technical problem for the refrigerator manufacturer, right? At the physical layer, it totally is. We can drop wifi points and 802.11b radios all over the globe and we're in business. The restaurant chain is happy - the equipment vendor has handled it all and we're on our way.
But now all that data is coming into a server somewhere. And the questions start piling up:
1) Who owns that server? The restaurant chain or the fridge maker? Is the data proprietary?
2) Who is paying for the server maintenance? Who's paying for the broadband connections in every store?
3) Who is going to write the dashboard that lets corp see the nifty graphics about system uptime? Who maintains that? Where does it live?
So should the fridge maker switch to a subscription model and rent out the units? That'll take care of the cost. But if the restaurant is renting the units, then surely the fridge maker should be on 24/7 call to service these units when they fail! Oops, now the fridge maker needs to implement a service team.
This is a holy mess. There are plenty of middlemen popping up to handle the cloud layer like Digi and Exosite. But in the end someone has to write the check and neither side wants to do it. The restaurant wants their food safety data without the added cost. The fridge maker wants to sell units and minimize the support cost.
Companies like Amazon are in a much better position because that Dash button feeds directly into their ecosystem. For the rest of the world, the world that IoT is trying to target, they're still out in the cold.