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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.

The Right IoT Architecture Enables the Journey

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Over the past year and a half, there have been two common themes running through all the IoT related discussions I’ve had with companies big and small. From global corporations crafting a product or operational IoT strategy to small device manufacturers who knew they needed an IoT strategy to compete in the market to startups creating the latest connected service offering, everyone:

  1. struggled to think big enough with their long term IoT strategy *; they usually couldn’t think past the second stage of the IoT Journey.
  2. lacked a general IoT solution architecture as a reference point **; they struggled to understand and compare all the vendors who latched onto the IoT buzzword or called themselves an IoT Platform…

Almost a year ago I presented my vision of the IoT Journey based upon all the customer and partner conversations I had spanning multiple IoT verticals like Automotive, Transportation, Industrial Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Service Sector, and Smart Cities. What I quickly realized was that IoT architecture decisions were being made based on the early stages of the journey and the people building IoT solutions were going to face an expensive re-architecture in the future to fully realize the potential of IoT.

For the past few months I have used my recent down time to document the IoT Solution architecture that I saw as common across all those discussions and used that as my own IoT Solution Reference Architecture to understand the breadth and depth of the various IoT solutions and vendors in the market. After using both the Journey and the Solution Reference Architecture in all my most recent conversations (and being prodded by a few trusted colleagues), I realized I was way overdue in sharing both in more detail.

The generic high level picture most often shown for an IoT Solution looks like this:

Generic IoT Solution Diagram

Things connecting into the cloud and sending up their data for storage and analytics with users accessing the Solution via either a web or mobile app (or both) to view data send commands down to the thing. When in reality there is much more complexity that is needed and most IoT Solution (should) have an underlying architecture like this:

IoT Solution Reference Architecture Diagram

First, this is a general IoT Solution Architecture, each specific IoT Solution will be more detailed and varied due to business problem specifics, industry regulations, and technical specifics. There is a lot of details, even at an abstracted level like this, and my next few posts will be exploring those details.  I have also converted this architecture diagram into a solution functionality map which I have been using to compare different vendor offerings, I’ll be posting more on that in the future as well.

How does this compare to your IoT Solution reference architecture?  This project spun out of some IoT consulting work that I have been doing with various clients recently.  Please reach out to discuss any IoT projects you may have going on and how I may be able to help you.

 

* A friend of mine at GE Digital even mentioned that when they do their training courses around IoT for executives, they purposely don’t have them try to think about IoT for their product/offering.  It’s hard for anyone who focuses on the current state of their business to quickly jump to think out of that box.

** Even to this day I’m surprised by how many charts of the IoT Marketplace that you find that don’t differentiate between companies using IoT within their offerings versus those providing the IoT building block technologies used to build those prior offerings.