IoT users don’t care about technologies – They want solutions and services

The Internet of Things (IoT) market is increasingly being viewed as the next great development of the internet, writes Robin Duke-Woolley, the founder and chief executive of Beecham Research. This has prompted many to get rather carried away with the potential size of the market opportunity, but that is another story (see for example Beecham Research urges industry to ’get real’ about IoT predictions).

As part of its development, increasing attention is being given to connecting anything and everything that generates any data at all so it can then be used to create new value, quite possibly in a wide variety of new and different ways. In turn this has led to growing attention on very low data rate applications that have not been cost effective to connect before now. An important part of this has been the rapid introduction of Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies.

These are technologies that can deliver very low data rates over long distances using only tiny amounts of power and at very low cost. What does that mean in practice? Essentially, if there is a prospect that connecting something could generate worthwhile information, cost and form factor need no longer to be the major limiting factors they have been. Almost anything that is worthwhile tracking can be tracked – your pet cat for example or, in a farming situation, individual heads of cattle roaming quite freely. Almost anything in the home that is worthwhile monitoring as well – checking if any window has been left open for example. It truly has the potential to open up a whole new market of applications both for business use and, perhaps more interestingly, for consumer use as well.

So we have to ask ourselves – what will get people thinking about these new applications and wanting them in very large numbers? One thing we can certainly say is, not through a discussion about the underlying technologies. The general attitude is going to be, “so long as it works and is cheap enough, who cares how it works?” Instead, what people are going to have to decide is – what’s the easiest way to get this done? Is there a ready-made solution I can buy? Is there a ready-made service I can buy? Implementation will be the biggest cost and the biggest barrier to mass deployment, not the technologies themselves.

We hear a lot about how “this technology can meet all your needs” but by definition of a brand new market open to innovative ideas, nobody knows what all those needs are, so such a claim is clearly more of a hope than a reality.

So what does that mean in practice? The IoT industry needs to be talking about these technologies in terms that most people can understand and relate to – so they can decide themselves what’s best and easiest for them. Firstly, it has to be about the applications themselves. That’s what gets the ideas flowing. Secondly, about how those applications can be easily delivered to where they’re needed. That means matching the needs of that particular application to the most appropriate connectivity solution or connectivity service.

How do they do that then?