There is No Universal IoT Platform

Your business strategy and your customers should dictate how you define your IoT platform.

Your business needs should dictate what your IoT platform is. Not vendor definitions.

IoT sits at the intersection of IT and OT. Any IT-centric definition fails to capture OT significance and vice-versa. Hence, rather than provide an academic definition, let me share the practical view of how customers in different industries build and use technology platforms that leverage pervasive connectivity and pervasive computing.

I have come across IoT platforms that span this gamut:

If I were to draw a picture that encompassed all those variations, it would look like this:

It is an IT+OT Platform, not a platform based on ICT components alone.

If we exclude hardware and connectivity challenges and OT systems, we end up with the garden-variety IoT software platform (or IoT Data platform).

It looks like this:

It enables higher-level business function or operational tasks to be performed. Each of the tasks described above could be viewed as its own “platform” such as asset management platform or service assurance platform.

Those variations are task-specific abstractions built on the following five core functions in the IoT software layer:

Yes, easier said than done. Lots of middleware-sausage-making goes on to make this possible.

I can visualize companies hiring armies of full-stack developers to build a digital platform. The project gets on the engineering or IT leaderboards both in terms of resources consumed and enterprise-wide visibility, not to mention prestige in being associated with one.

Salvation comes in many forms. So do IoT platforms.

Your business strategy and how you serve your customers by combining IT and OT dictates how you define what is in your IoT platform. You can then make informed choices and select components for that IoT platform from the plethora of options out there.

In 2017, may you create your own definition of an IoT platform. May this be the last IoT platform post you read about!

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