Finding USP in IoT ecosystem part -2

from Finding USP in IoT ecosystem part -2
by Anasia D'mello
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Via this series of articles, our objective is not only to chart out the IoT Value chain but also the market/economic structures and changing dynamics around them. This write-up is aimed at addressing the business decision makers who are attempting to figure out a solution strategy & USP in each component of Value chain. In last article we focused on IoT sensors, devices, gateways & communication part of Value chain. In this article we, Arpit Khosla and Praneet Thakur of IoT Australia Consulting Services shall dive into IoT Platforms.

Considering the multitude of ways in which the term “IoT Platform “can be interpreted, we take this opportunity to first give our view on what all does an IoT platform encompass. At a high level, it encompasses horizontal & vertical capabilities. Some of the capabilities that can be flagged as horizontal are Connectivity Management, Device Management, Data Ingestion & Storage, Application Enablement Platform & Analytics enablement Platforms. Sometimes Billing platforms providing End to End Billing are also a part of the Horizontal Platforms Family. The Applications themselves are more vertical or scenario specific and hence can be categorised as being a vertical capability. Let us look at each of those capabilities in from strategy & USP lens.

As far as Connectivity Management is concerned, though one may need to choose the right technology based on coverage range, security, mobility, throughout, Scalability, power profiles & latency requirements, but solution itself is typically taken care of by network providing operator. From solution strategy perspective ,there are some key decisions like licensed vs unlicensed SIM, SIM vs eSIM, & split billing vs end to end Billing but they warrant another Article, so we will not go in their details in this one.

Similarly from device management solution strategy perspective the technical decesion maker needs to address the requirements of Device lifecycle management, command and control, monitoring, auditing, firmware updates at. In this context the decision maker needs to consider not only standard protocols like LWM2M & OMADM but also context specific protocols which could be OPC-UA, Profinet, Modbus, and Hart etc. However from USP perspective, there is not much that an Innovator can draw from either connectivity management or device management functionality.

The data ingestion & storage platforms are no strangers to challenges of heterogeneity, evolving standards and requirement to handle scalability with the right security posture. From a solution strategy perspective, choosing the right protocol amongst https, MQTT, CoAP, AMQP etc. is one key decision to make. Typically most platforms offer support for above protocols but it is the commercials and ease of integration that drives the decision here. For instance some platforms provide set of libraries to enable communication which warrant time & effort investment for development, on the other hand others offer low code / low touch configuration based setup.

From Solution availability perspective we see three approaches. Firstly data ingestion brokers and storage platforms are part of suite offered by End to End Horizontal Cloud platform providers such as AWS & Azure. These attempt to simplify the [...]

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