Enterprises are inundated with information about IoT platforms’ features and capabilities. But to find a long-lived IoT platform that minimizes ongoing development costs, enterprises must focus on exceptional user experience (UX) for 5 types of IoT platform users.Marketing and sales literature from IoT platform vendors is filled with information about IoT platform features. And no doubt, enterprises choosing to buy IoT platform services need to understand the actual capabilities of IoT platforms – preferably by testing a variety of IoT platforms – before making a purchase decision.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprises adopt IoT solutions for two primary reasons. First, they want to lower their companies’ operating and capital costs. These types of IoT solutions including factory automation, remote asset monitoring, fleet management, and smart metering help enterprises improve their bottom lines by focusing on all sorts of cost reduction.Second, enterprises want to add IoT to the products they sell to their customers. This allows enterprises to bundle new connectivity-based services with their core products, thereby increasing revenue and differentiating their offerings. Examples of these types of IoT solutions include in-vehicle infotainment, connected welding equipment, connected commercial-grade power tools, and many more.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprises rely on their IoT platforms for many services. One of the most important is analytics. In layman’s terms, IoT analytics is the science and art of trying to find patterns in the massive quantity of data generated by connected assets. Or a more careful definition from MachNation’s IoT platform testing lab might be, analytics is the ability of a platform administrator or operator to monitor trends, identify abnormalities, and produce business insights from ingested IoT data.As a first step to identifying a best-in-class IoT platform for analytics, an enterprise should deploy the various platform analytics services. In particular, the enterprise should at least configure an on-platform analytics service for live streaming and stored/historical data; configure a platform for live streaming external analytics service integrations; and then export on-platform data to an external analytics service. These configuration tests will help an enterprise determine if an IoT platform vendor has designed exceptional or lackluster management tools and usability into its platform.To read this article in full, please click here
Last week, I received an email from Checkfluid, an Ontario, Canada-based enterprise that builds oil quality sensors and oil sampling valves for equipment condition monitoring and predictive maintenance. Like all executives who contact us with good Internet of Things (IoT) questions, Checkfluid’s President Mike Hall was asking my opinion of best-in-class IoT platforms to power his company's journey into IoT. “As we start the product development process, it is important to make the best IoT platform choice possible as this decision could be with us for a long time,” stated Hall. As we know, identifying a high quality, scalable, easy-to-use IoT platform makes a huge difference in an enterprise’s IoT deployment.To read this article in full, please click here
With over 400 self-proclaimed IoT platforms in the market, it doesn’t surprise me that industrial enterprises are hindered trying to identify, test and select a high quality IoT platform. Platform vendors’ marketing materials contain the same messages, their RFX responses always affirm “full compliance” with all requested capabilities and they have partnerships with the same cloud vendors. With over 400 self-proclaimed IoT platforms in the market, the only way to truly know each platform is to use it.What makes a great IoT AEP?
An Application Enablement Platform (AEP) is a technology-centric offering optimized to deliver a best-of-breed, industry-agnostic, extensible middleware core for building a set of interconnected or independent IoT solutions for customers. An AEP links IoT devices and applications, delivering data to allow industrial enterprises to implement predictive maintenance, machine learning, factory automation, asset logistics, surveillance and many other applications. With IoT platform revenue slated to grow to USD 63.4 billion by 2026, IoT application enablement is one of the most highly demanded enterprise IoT platforms.To read this article in full, please click here
As an IoT platform and middleware analyst, I am asked constantly about the benefits of IoT platforms and “what makes a great IoT platform.” In response, I often ask these curious inquirers if they’ve ever used IoT platforms themselves. Walking on the edge is exhilarating, but having hands-on insights, data and expertise on how to survive the journey is even better.What do users actually experience when they use IoT edge platforms?IoT edge computing is a technology architecture that brings certain computational and analytics capabilities near the point of data generation. IoT edge platforms provide the management capabilities required to deliver data from IoT devices to applications while ensuring that devices are properly managed over their lifetimes. Enterprises use edge platforms for factory automation, warehousing/logistics, connected retail, connected mining and many other solutions. With IoT platform revenue slated to grow to USD63.4 billion by 2026, IoT edge is one of the most highly relied upon enterprise IoT platform approaches. To read this article in full, please click here
Steven Hilton