As IoT adapts to the pandemic-hit world, it faces new challenges in the form of supply chain issues and a changed world of work. However, within these challenges are new opportunities to ensure greater choice alongside resilient and robust IoT connectivity, components, software and hardware.
Taylor Wolfe, the head of Global IoT Sales and Business Development at Twilio, tells George Malim, the managing editor of IoT Now, that while cost is always important as IoT scales up deploying cloud connectivity that offers flexibility and resilience is a more important enabler of success
George Malim: What is your view of the trend towards IoT organisations buying more functionality from fewer suppliers? Is the trend of acquiring building blocks composed of adjacent capabilities a big step in simplifying and accelerating IoT?
Taylor Wolfe: What we’re seeing – and some of this is accelerated by the chip shortage and supply chain issues – is customers are focusing on what value they can get out of each endpoint in IoT. It’s a transition from five years ago when the focus was on how to design an endpoint that could sit out in the world and we have seen customers transition to what value they can get from the endpoint.
There are two trends within this. One is that, with the arrival of broader sensing capabilities, more customers are trying to put everything they can onto the device. We’re seeing fleet management devices not just have simple on-board diagnostics (OBD) II capabilities but also video because, once you have video, you have the data necessary to build a lot of intelligence on top of that.
We’re seeing customers who put a camera on the endpoint and trigger images from an accelerometer and get more understanding of what’s happening than they would from telematics. By adding contextual information, such as an image to tell whether it was raining, they get deeper insights and ultimately more value.
Customers are preparing ahead of time as they put hardware out, by ensuring it can do more than it needs to today and that it can last longer in the field. This trend has been exacerbated by the chip shortage.
The second trend relates to customers that want to buy more from a single vendor. In IoT there are a lot of off-the-shelf devices and lots of full stack IoT solutions being sold. Previously, customers wanted to control their destiny and we saw them move to building their own hardware, but now the trend is back to adding value, and that is happening in the cloud and applications layer. Customers’ secret sauce and what is proprietary to their business is generally not in the hardware layer. In addition, we work with a lot of start-ups and they need to figure out if their cash burn is better directed at software development rather than hardware designs.
Customers therefore are looking at hardware that is perhaps not fully off-the-shelf but utilises a reference design, so they can spend their resources in the cloud and applications layer. We’re certainly seeing customers swing towards that and, as the pendulum moves, the market is ending up in the middle with a reference design for hardware that they can take and get to market with very quickly.
The only exception to this is in the consumer market where companies develop hardware specifically for their customers. Everywhere else, a quasi-off-the-shelf approach is being adopted. If I was procuring hardware right now, I would particularly want that single point of contact that you get from using a supplier that is bringing together multiple components in a device. That way, it lets them deal with all the headaches around the current supply chain problems.
Continue reading this article on Page 8 inside IoT Now Magazine Q4 2021
