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My IoT Solution Framework

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[ February 2018 Update: The IoT Scorecards add on to my IoT Solution Framework has been discontinued.  Lack of time to dedicate to this endeavor and the speed at which the IoT market has been evolving makes my initial work obsolete.  ]

Over the past 2 years I’ve developed a picture of what almost any IoT Solution, or IoT Application, must have as the various technology bits and pieces.  I first created this IoT Solution Framework while working with potential partners as a way to set a foundation for exploring IoT partnerships and explaining where their stuff fit and where my stuff fit. Eventually, I started to use this framework to compare IoT vendors and understand where they fit in the bigger picture of the IoT market.

By IoT Vendors I’m referring to companies that are selling technology that is used to build an IoT Solution, like a smart thermostat, or a connected machine.  I’m not referring to companies that are selling the smart thermostat or the connected machine, though they are building an IoT Solution which is will match some or all of my framework.

After sharing this general framework with a few people from my network, it appeared that my framework filled a gap in the IoT market.  I’ve refined the framework a bit more and recorded this video presentation to be able to share it publicly.  So, as a way of launching the latoga labs YouTube channel, here is my Anatomy of an IoT Solution:

I’ve taken this framework and applied it to various IoT Vendors that I’ve been talking to over the past few months.  That developed into the IoT Vendor Scorecards that I have started to share in the IoT Lab. The scorecards are designed to give you a quick view of how different IoT Vendors compare based on the seven areas of my IoT Solution Framework. This is not a deep technical overview of these vendors, but a higher level abstraction that allows business and technology executives to discuss their IoT Solution within a common framework.

The 7 Areas of the latoga labs IoT Solution Framework.
The 7 Areas of the latoga labs IoT Solution Framework

The current list of IoT Vendors is just a sample based on my recent activity and I expect this list to grow (it has been highly focused on the software side of IoT to date).  I’m working through a more detailed scorecard for each as my time allows.  I’ll be updating the list as I publish those scorecards and post updates on the blog.

What part of the framework do you like the most? What part do you disagree with the most? What areas need further explanation? Who are the important vendors that you think are currently missing from the scorecard list? Please let me know by sharing a comment.

If you represent an IoT vendors, on my list or not, and want to chat please contact me directly.

Borrowing a line:

If you like my scorecard concept…please share them with your friends and colleagues.
If you hate my scorecard concept…please share them with your enemies and competition.

Will HomePod be Apple’s Smart Home Hub?

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It’s always fun to see what new things Apple announced at WWDC.  After some thought and discussion time to process Apple’s WWDC 2017 Keynote, rather than focus on the AR demo (which I also think is the seed for some future disruption) I’ve been thinking about IoT and the smart home segment of IoT.  One question remains to be answered for me, will the HomePod be Apple’s smart home hub?

Apple is playing catch up in this area and is obviously feeling the pressure if they are announcing a new product 6 months before availability, something that is very anti-Appleesque.  Though one could argue that this is natural evolution for their product announcements since they all expand the Apple Ecosystem and you need to have developers connecting to the new device before they ship (especially when Amazon’s Echo has over 10,000 skills already). Every time they do this the hope fades a bit more within the Apple fan base around Apple every surprising us again with a killer new technology innovation, but that’s a whole nother rabbit hole to go down.

So when playing catch up, it’s not surprising that Apple would play to their strengths…music. The HomePod was introduced as a reimagined way to do music within the home (we should all be getting good at seeing thru the marketing rhetoric by now).  It’s initial specs look like a great home speaker and integrated with Apple Music gives you more options than time in your life to listen to.  And at the end there was an almost passing remark about the HomePod being part of the HomeKit.  The HomePod page even mentions “it’s a hub for controlling your smart home accessories”.  But, the current specs don’t talk about any local area communications, no Bluetooth, no Z-Wave, no zigbee.

Would Apple jump on the Z-Wave or zigbee bandwagons to quickly expand the Smart Home options and have their HomePod also become one of the core SmartHome bridges?  Again, not very Appleesque. But I would expect to at least have seen bluetooth on the HomePod so all those HomeKit devices that use bluetooth and the AppleTV as their hub would have another way to enter the Apple Ecosystem.  It just makes sense to use the HomePod’s processing power to also control and bridge the smart home to Siri and the Apple Ecosystem, but that is being seen as a side feature to the speaker.  I’m expecting (or hoping) that bluetooth appears in the specs before the HomePod is shipped in 6 months.  And it will be interesting to see what home kit integrations we see when the HomePod final ships.

What this shows is how IoT is an enabling technology but not something that most consumers think about buying directly.  Consumers especially are spending discretionary budget on things they enjoy…like Music.  And the ecosystem power is in pulling the consumer into this larger thing than just music without them realizing it.  So again, while Apple may be late to the home speaker market, they have created something that consumers will understand the need for immediately and purchase.  Compare that to the immediate thought many of us had when the Amazon Echo appears…”why do I need that anyway?”.  I think the HomePod will quickly catching up to Amazon’s Echo in shipments and help push the smarts into the home faster without people realizing it.

IoT World 2017 Thoughts

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Last week I was at IoT World 2017 in Santa Clara and while I only stopped in at the vendor expo for a few days, there were a number of changes within the expo floor from last year that I noticed.

  • We are still very much in Day 1 of IoT.  Things are still ebbing and flowing as the underlying vendors within IoT figure out what they want to be.
  • I noticed a number new (to me at least) smaller platform vendors, though they are at least focusing their platform, or at least their marketing, on specific vertical areas of IoT.
  • Pivots are still happening; platform vendors are adding devices and turning into solution providers; some solution providers are ditching their devices to focus on their platforms, and some larger firms are realizing that there is little value for them in trying to be their own platform and instead have OEM’d someone else’s platform (though this is sometimes apparent and sometimes not).
  • A few vendors are understanding the ecosystem needs around IoT and were presenting themselves as the ecosystem hub, Samsung specifically…
  • …while other ecosystem driven vendors chose not to represent, Amazon Web Services and GE Predix specifically.
  • I found it still hard to differentiate between vendors as building block providers, integrated platform providers, or vertical solution providers.
  • Customers are better educated on what IoT means and seemed to be asking more specific question around use cases and projects.

It seems that there still is a need for a IoT Solution reference architecture which can be used to both connect the business and technical as well as gauge vendors offering against.  Which is something that I have been working on for a while in the background and look forward to offering up to the community soon.

20170523 Update: I forgot to mention that one of the most interesting enabling technologies that I came across at IoT World was from Matrix Industries. It’s not really the smartwatch they show on their website but the underlying Thermoelectric Technology.  Take heat and turn it into power to charge a battery.  In the world of IoT, and I’m thinking specifically IIoT, there is heat generation that already happens due to the operation of the device. Using a thermoelectric generator (TEG), like the one Matrix Industries has inside their smartwatch, you could power your IoT related sensors and possibly the communication channel (assuming they are both low power enough to be powered by a TEG) as a side effect of the waste energy from your device/equipment.  I haven’t dug into this much in depth, but it’s an interesting potential concept to help create longevity and increase the scalability of the sensors within your IoT Solution.