IoT Market Myopia
The Internet of Things has come of age, but you wouldn’t know it. This month, I’ve been reflecting on a new report from Bain and Company, The Future of Technology. In the section called “The Internet of Things Get Real” (page 44), something seemed very right and very wrong.
Overall, it’s great. The subtitle nails the author’s main point: “It’s about analytics, not simply connecting devices.” They discuss rising IoT use cases and “how businesses can unlock insights that lead to better decision making and powerful gains in efficiency, productivity, and return on investments (ROI).” Good stuff!
But the characterization of the “IoT Platform market” exhibits myopia that’s pervasive throughout the trillion-dollar machine designed to sell you more software and services. Bain describes the “IoT Platform” market with this chart:
The data comes from the number of times IoT is mentioned in LinkedIn profiles. The problem is, people don’t think in terms of IoT, they think of capabilities and solutions. When was the last time you thought: “I need a new IoT device.” The answer is probably never! Yet you probably have a mobile phone, a watch, and a car loaded with sensors.
Charting the “IoT Software Market” is like mapping the galaxies based on what you can view through a straw.
In the past 30 days, I’ve had 21 executive tech briefings with customers. 17 involved IoT. Two had IoT on the agenda, explicitly. We discussed data virtualization, visual analytics and streaming analytics. Four included a patent we just filed about dynamic learning, a machine learning technique that learns on the fly from streaming IoT data.
Recently, I recorded a podcast with Javier de la Cruz García Dihinx, the managing director of digital services for Spanish train manufacturer CAF. Javier’s team has built dozens of analytics applications for automating trains, including predictive maintenance, monitoring, and alerting. CAF has a COVID-19-inspired app that determines how crowded each car is and sends the information in real-time to passengers at the next stop. Now that’s an app I want! But Javier didn’t utter “IoT” once because IoT is everywhere.
So here is my non-scientific version of the IoT market. I tried to position the Bain chart a little closer to scale :)
So read this report, it’s good. But skip the part about the software vendors because every piece of software you buy should support IoT!
Thank you to Dmitry Ratushny for the social media images used to share this article on Unsplash.
