There is a trend in the IoT landscape of vendor consolidation around a few major platform vendors. The vendors from different links of the chain collaborate by providing a seamless experience to build, deploy and operate IoT solutions. Many of the major IoT platform leaders have defined end to end system specifications with their ecosystem partners for a secure, scalable and interoperable deployments. This has led to transforming the vertically fragmented and inadequate proprietary markets into well-organized and horizontally scalable open markets. It will enable key players to gain a major share in the IoT market, which is predicted by IDC to reach an annual revenue of USD 1.7 trillion by 2020.
Collaboration, Acquisitions and Partnerships
The acquisition of Wind River and McAfee by Intel, Nest by Google, Solair by Microsoft, Jasper by Cisco and Atmel by Microchip can be seen as strengthening their foothold and consolidation of services in the IoT ecosystem. These market leaders have also formed alliances and partnerships with other horizontal leaders, SMEs and start-ups to build their own ecosystem. Some of these partnerships are Samsung-SAP, Cisco-GE, Apple-IBM. All these happened because of the awareness of the industry that there was too much fragmentation with companies working in silos. These heavy-duty collaborations are essential for the IoT market to succeed. It is interesting to note that innovation is a key element and the start-ups are going to play a crucial role in that. 2lemetry, Estimote, Digital Lumens, Litbit, Skycatch are some of the leading start-ups getting attention with their innovative ideas.
What the market looks for
When businesses plan for the IoT transformation, the major considerations are the ease of interoperability, seamless integration, maintainability and scalability factors. The other factors being reducing risk and lowering the cost of implementation and operation.
The market needs vendors, device manufacturers and services providers who can help to quickly rollout the IoT solution with the essentials. These include automated discovery and provisioning of sensors and actuators, device control, seamless storage and processing of data, security of data and devices, analytics capability and monetizing of the services. This is where these collaborations are going to benefit the end customer and the industry as a whole.
The Benefit and Value Add
The crux of this collaboration is the desire of every player in IoT, big or small, for a transformation from a product business into services business, seeing the long term and continuous monetization opportunity. In essence, the alliances of platform leaders with vendors at different planes of the spectrum will influence the choices of picking devices, software, services and operators in an end to end IoT solution. The positive note about all these collaborations and alliances is that it is going to eventually help the end users with competitive pricing, faster deployments, innovative and effective solutions.
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