Since the arrival of the term “IoT” and the switch from the M2M mindset to the IoT mindset, forward-thinking companies have raced to be first to market with “industry disruptive” or “transformative” IoT solutions. However, more and more companies leveraging IoT for the last few years are coming to us with a similar story. Although they’ve had some success because they were among the early adopters, some of the cutting-edge solutions they’ve invested in are, funnily enough, outdated.
The problem is, in 2016, IoT as a whole was reaching its adolescence. As we navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, IoT has reached early adulthood thanks to innovation during and because of the pandemic. And that means for companies looking to scale and scale, big, hard choices have to be made about scrapping much of the work done and deployed in the last six years and standardizing on the technologies that won the race. Anyone in NorAm who deployed Sigfox or MiWi knows this fact better than anyone. There was no ecosystem to support those technologies, unlike open technologies like LoRaWAN. The rise of LoRa caused the demise of those leading ‘closed system’ technologies that were critical in the early years of IoT. The vendor lock didn’t work; the people have voted against it. Instead, significant open ecosystems like LoRaWAN are gaining momentum at breakneck speed.
For some companies, this could be a difficult pill to swallow. In IoT’s infancy, everyone did whatever it took to get their solution into the market the quickest. Foresight and thoughtfulness often gave way to speed and PR splashes. The “right” answer was usually “good enough.” Now, company leaders are rethinking and reexamining their approach to the IoT space. This became very clear when I spoke to dozens of companies at the Miami IoT Evolution Expo in June.
The consensus was that these companies are planning to consolidate, and it’s mainly around the technology. They deployed at scale. They know it’s a hard decision to re-work what they’ve built, particularly for those who’ve sunk millions of dollars into the build and now they need to start over. It’s painful, but like so many technologies in the past, IoT has matured. These intelligent leaders know it’s time to evolve.