THE HERITAGE OF SMART SYSTEMS
For
all their sophistication, many of today’s IoT systems are direct
descendants of traditional “remote monitoring systems” where each
device acts in a “hub and spoke” mode. Individual spokes don’t speak
directly to their “peers”; everything goes through the hub. This
heritage leaves many of today’s evolving data management tools unable
to interoperate and perform well with distributed heterogeneous machine
and sensor environments.
What’s
required instead is a shift from the simple device monitoring to a
model where device data is aggregated into a shared environment. The
many “nodes” of a network may not be very “smart” in themselves, but
when they are networked to connect and share data, they begin to give
rise to complex, system-wide behavior, and the Smart Systems world
needs to benefit from this new order of intelligence.
Source: Harbor Research, Inc.
Users
and providers of today’s custom-configured IoT and Smart Systems
solutions—which are designed to address specific applications and use
cases, including asset tracking, equipment monitoring and predictive
maintenance—will increasingly be pressured to migrate these focused
solutions across as many platforms, marketplaces and ecosystems as
possible. In order to remain competitive, system providers will need to
evolve toward business models that address a larger and more impactful
scope of value. Getting to this future state requires that players act
more as orchestrators of data and data services in an expanded
ecosystem of peer contributors and participants.
THE EMERGENCE OF DATA ECOSYSTEMS
Data
ecosystems organized by players such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and
Netflix have demonstrated that they can create enormous value for B2C
businesses. Google, Facebook, Amazon and similar peers have a unified
usage and data relationship with their respective users—so much so that
they don’t require additional data sources to create value within their
business models. Mobile phone data-feeds come from virtually everyone
today and provide consumer Internet players with just about everything
they would ever want to know about the user.
B2B
alliance and ecosystem development for smart systems today looks
nothing like the mobile and consumer Internet worlds. Why? The mobile
phone business spent years looking for its killer application and, as
things turned out, the killer application ended up being the ecosystem
of application developers, exemplified by the rapid growth of the iOS
and Android platforms.
Data and apps are the core value creation mechanisms within the Smart Systems and the IoT.
But
the B2B world that comprises so much of the IoT doesn’t have the same
unified sources or monolithic usage tracking and analytics that the
consumer world utilizes to make money. Reliable sources estimate that
they lack half the data needed to inform new application values and
fulfill on artificial intelligence and machine learning opportunities.
How should B2B players think about creating equivalent value with data?
Given the environment they’re in, we at Harbor have long maintained that B2B players should create data ecosystems.
However,
ecosystem development in B2B domains has been much slower in its
evolution than in the consumer world. Product OEMs and machine builders
work with software developers and solution players in a much more
“command and control” mode and have largely forged only simple
relationships with wireless carriers, enterprise applications or
professional services providers.
Source: Harbor Research, Inc.
