Friday discussion: Why BOMs are essential for the IoT platform

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ve heard about the Internet of Things or as many refer to it, IoT. It is the inter-networking of physical devices, vehicles (also referred to as “connected devices” and “smart devices”), buildings, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity which enable these objects to collect and exchange data.

The Postscapes article, IoT platforms, presents a table with 126 platforms. Isn’t that amazing? Check it out. It is hard to imagine how many platforms are out there and even harder to imagine how to choose one. In the engineering and manufacturing world, I’ve been following two vendors, PTC and Siemens, with their IoT platform strategy. For the past few days, I’ve been following the Siemens Analyst Conference in Boston. Check out the following twitter hashtag to find more information: #SiAC2017.

I found a few interesting data points about Siemens MindSphere in the following slide shared by Allan Behrens on Twitter.

However, my favorite slide was this one shared by Brad Holtz:

The slide shared by Brad presents a great story of maintenance processes centered around connected (IoT enabled) products and devices. The following thoughts struck me as very significant: each of those boxes on the slide require some knowledge about the product, its parts, and other related information. Although the IoT platform focuses on services (first slide, above), the information infrastructure able to scale on the web and also scale globally will be useful for sharing data between these processes, events and end points.

Now let me connect two dots together. openbom provides a global and scalable information network to manage data on a web scale and is also able to share data instantly with different applications and processes. It’s a topic we want to explore further and invite further discussion with you.

Conclusion. IoT platforms are both an emerging and trending reality. But the way to connect and share information between IoT platform services can be a tricky thing (at least based on my current understanding). If you are familiar with IoT platform services reach out to me. I’d be happy to discuss. Especially, if you’re using one of the IoT platforms mentioned above. I’d be interested to learn more about what you do and offer ideas of how openbom can help. Let me know. I will buy lunch :).

Best, Oleg

PS. Let’s get to know each other better. If you live in the Greater Boston area, I invite you for a coffee together (coffee is on me). If not nearby, let’s have a virtual coffee session — I will figure out how to send you a real coffee.