Smart Industry 1/2019

Smart Business IoT Platforms
engine can evaluate the content to
make a routing decision … and publish
[commands] to a vent, heater, or
chiller, correcting a temperature by
opening a window in the polytunnel
or adding humidity with a sprayer.”
He adds that to make sense of the
alert, data can be routed into longterm
storage with Redshift and S3
and used to create visualizations in a
dashboard app.
Bigger Is Better –
for Many
According to Antonysamy, all four platforms
have their roots in their underlying
cloud/PaaS platforms and they have
evolved into IoT platforms by introducing
core IoT services such as device
connectivity and management, and
streaming analytics, along with other
“product-as-a-service” offerings for storage,
compute, analytics, and enterprise
integration. That heady combination of
size and broad capability seems destined
to convey an important, long-term
advantage, he thinks. In fact, according
to the 451 Research survey, those companies
that have adopted IoT platforms
from the Big Four are farther along in
their digital transformations. Potentially,
this indicates that the die has been cast
and that these major providers are very
much baked into long-term planning.
source ©: Illustration, reprinted with permission of Christian Renaud, 451 Research, from Internet of Things Vendor Evaluations 2018
Enterprises Turn to Multiple IoT Platforms
Top reason: IoT specialty / vertical platforms running on cloud IoT PaaS / IaaS
Incidence of joint usage
IoT platform vendor in use Low Moderate High
Total
[n=301]
Microsoft Azure
IoT
[n=106]
IBM Cloud / Watson
IoT
[n=101]
Google Cloud
IoT
[n=80]
Amazon AWS
IoT
[n=79]
Microsoft Azure 35% 100% 29% 35% 37%
IBM Cloud / Watson 34% 27% 100% 28% 34%
Google Cloud 27% 26% 22% 100% 44%
Amazon AWS 26% 27% 27% 44% 100%
Other 64% 58% 54% 68% 65%
Running best-of-breed / industry specific IoT application on another vendor's PaaS / IaaS
Most important reasons for using multiple IoT platform vendor
% of respondents [n=180]
Optimizing across multiple platforms for cost
Replicating applications on a second vendor for redundancy
No single vendor fills all IoT requirements
Vendor lock-in concerns
33%
40%
48%
56%
59%
• Deployment options: Can the solution
be deployed in the cloud or
does it have to be on premises?
• Integration: Do other enterprise applications
(either on-premises or in
the cloud) have to be taken into account?
• Non-functional requirements: Scalability,
performance, security, and
other technical considerations also
need to be weighed up.
• Availability of development accelerators:
Time to value can be reduced
if solution templates, device agents/
plug-and-play devices, and other
preconfigured kit can be used.
• Relationship with the vendor: Ability
to influence the roadmap, price
negotiation, etc.
The list of rules grows every day and
is already far more extensive than the
key considerations listed here. The
Making Sense
of It All
The IoT platform
space is important,
but crowded and
confusing. There are
platforms for many
specific industries
and even for various
devices, and hardly
any one size will
really fit all.
same is true of the number and varieties
of platforms and 451 Research
says it is already tracking hundreds of
IoT platforms.
It is clear that Antonysamy’s examples
form a generalized list of the full complement
of commercial IoT platforms
available and choosing the best option
requires planning and a deep
understanding of business requirements.
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