IoT sensors and collection points (“Gateways” or “RTU’s” to use an old term) are rapidly being commoditized. Prices are plummeting while reliability and functionality increase.
As we’ve seen time-and-time again when hardware moves to the commoditization phase, players previously making money on hardware realize that the data is where the money is going to be. Realizing that, they skate towards a proprietary software system that traps their customers into their sensors, data, software and services. The “container” for the data, services, and analytics to generate events is sometimes these days called an “IoT Application”.
Bigger IoT consumers – those in the industries of mining, energy, chain restaurants, infrastructure, insurance, healthcare, etc. – typically have several different sensor vendors deployed in their field. Each sensor vendor often brings their own IoT Applications with it. With these “islands” of IoT sensor vendors comes silos of data in these disparate IoT Applications.
These IoT Applications are not all created equal. They have varying degrees of software build quality, security, software “productization” knowledge (asking a hardware engineer to construct a world-class software system is like asking a software engineer to build a sensor – not a good thing to do). Further, they don’t work together, nor are they capable of considering the other business data readily available today.
As this industry matures, customers will demand more openness with their IoT data, and enterprise software quality of the IoT Application. They want a single place to turn their data into events and alarms, and to trigger business processes (workflows) when an emerging situation of interest is found in the real-time data and action needs to be taken (what Spieker Point calls “Actionable Analytics”).
As the industry of IoT is “componentized” or “layered”, software system’s such as our DECK DecisionWare will grow in popularity:
- We’re already doing business with sensor vendors who realize that the buy vs build decision lands deeply in favor of a mature and secure solution such as DECK DecisionWare.
- Large IoT customers will demand that data from the various sensor vendors at their site will need to be available to DECK DecisionWare to ensure commonality of events, alarms, Actionable Analytics, data storage, etc.
- Everyone will look to a system like DECK DecisionWare to integrate data across from the customer’s business – not just the field – to have better visibility and make better, quicker decisions.
Our DECK DecisionWare platform is already bringing together IoT and business operational data for both sensor vendors and IoT customers. We would love to show you how it can help you make sense of all of your data at a much better price point than the islands of data and software you have today.