What are the long-term implications of enterprise investments into IoT?
Sunlight’s Kosten Metreweli discussed the topic with MarketScale’s Daniel Litwin live on This Week in B2B (July 29th, 2022)
Litwin and Metreweli begin by discussing The 2022 ISG Provider Lens™ Internet of Things — Services and Solutions report launched on July 21, 2022. According to the results, U.S. businesses are growing more ambitious with their Internet of Things (IoT) plans. Focusing on making integrated long-term investments rather than just trialling these technologies in short stints.
This demonstrates a major shift in maturity and how companies are engaging with edge technologies and digital transformation investments. And this investment climate will impact how IoT providers will interface with decision makers as well as which technologies are chosen as most useful.
Litwin: To quote the press release, U.S. enterprises investing in IoT are increasingly starting out with long-term strategies instead of discrete proofs of concept. What has shifted?
Metreweli: There’s definitely a real shift from smaller projects to enterprise-wide deployments. What are the drivers? Probably 3 things:
1. Enterprises have seen significant improvements resulting from their pilots with real results and now want to expand this across their businesses. One critical effect, generally speaking, is that where traditionally you have one group of people who manage the OT (operational technology) such as the factory machines and that sort of thing and on the other hand you have the IT people who manage what we typically know as IT. We’re now seeing those two disciplines coming together and the much faster pace that IT tends to move at is now being moved across into OT and driving the need to expand out.
2. The second thing is the availability of the technology you need to make these things happen. For a while it has been a craft effort to pull all of the pieces you need together to make an IoT solution work. Now, some ecosystems are forming between the hardware providers (we’re doing a lot of work with Lenovo, for example, who have some great edge technologies that are fantastic for IoT), the edge infrastructure companies (the software infrastructure like Sunlight that ties that all together) and then the applications that sit on top of that (especially the AI, Machine Learning and Video Analytics applications), as well of course as all of the IoT sensors. All of this is coming together to form an ecosystem.
3. Last, we’ve all been learning for a while how to do this. Now we’re seeing the System Integrators (SIs) are there and the enterprises themselves now have a lot of the skill sets to deploy these sorts of solutions at scale in enterprises. Notwithstanding the skills shortages that we’re seeing which are across IT as well.
Litwin: Several major companies have been trialling IoT investments for years now and it seems that now we’re in a place where enterprises better understand what their metrics for success are and I think that confidence now allows for them to say they’re ready to invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into these types of roll outs. What are those metrics of success? What have they learned along the way and do you think there’s still room to grow in those metrics of success or are they already pretty holistic?
Metreweli: I would say there is still plenty of room to grow. We’re very early in this cycle of technology. It’s an absolute critical shift in how manufacturing and industry operate. Some of the key metrics that organizations are looking to impact with IoT and edge technology are:
- Efficiency — to drive up quality, reduce downtime and improve yields. All of that massively improves the efficiency of the business.
- Visibility — to understand what’s going on at a micro level across the production line but also to understand from a granular perspective how the end-to-end supply chain operates. And of course, importantly, having less requirement to throw people at a situation by being able to automate more.
- Sustainability — the last thing here that is related to efficiency, and in the current environment is also important, a lot of organizations are pushing for ‘Net Zero’ and this is a way to make business operations more efficient.
Litwin: I’m sure that maturity from enterprises (or clients) is welcomed. Being able to communicate with an end user and strategize on deployment when they better understand what they’re asking for naturally is going to make it a smoother process. So with clients now approaching investments with more maturity, how is this shaping some of those conversations with solution providers. Is the scope of conversation now different? What kind of advice would you offer providers to manoeuvre this more mature type of client?
Metreweli: The conversations are different. Organizations have moved beyond just looking at point projects and are now they’re thinking holistically about how they can implement this technology across bigger swades of their business — so that changes how they think significantly. Now they want to make sure that they have solutions that are going to deliver immediate benefits and will grow with them in the future. That’s changed how they look at things. Everything has to be ‘enterprise class’ with ‘enterprise-class support’ to be effective.
The other thing we’re seeing is that organizations are moving away from the hobbyist (or craft) approach of piecing everything together and instead they’re now going to solution providers (SIs etc) and looking to get this edge and IoT capability delivered to them ‘as a service’. They’ve spent the last 10–15 years migrating everything to the cloud and they’re delighted they don’t have to worry about hardware anymore because that’s all managed by Azure or Amazon. Now suddenly, with edge technology and IoT, they have to worry about hardware again and they hate that. There are providers now (such as ourselves) that are focused on delivering this edge capability ‘as a service’ to them, so they can experience it pretty much as they experience cloud. That’s the sort of innovation that is going to be important to let them focus — not on the minutiae of the technology — but on getting the benefits from it instead.
Litwin: You bring up a great point, as folks have been transitioning towards more network support and more network integrations to gain more data analysis oversight over their projects, operations, software and as they invest in edge capacity, the personnel to run and troubleshoot those things don’t always have the same skills as IT professionals that are used to working with a bunch of new nodes and actual literal hardware.
Major challenges still exist, according to the ISG report, with an internal talent gap or lack of internal talent to build out these long term IoT systems and manage roll outs with expertise. The pool is rather limited. So what advice would you offer businesses that are still feeling the energy to make these long-term investments — they have the maturity, they understand the scope and they want to do it — but they just don’t have the personnel to implement it effectively or they don’t have the personnel to manage it once it’s already implemented?
Metreweli: You’re right. What we’re suggesting to customers is that they look for a solution that gives them as much of the solution as possible ‘as a service’, so they don’t need to worry about having those specific skill — they can get those from their solution provider. That makes is super simple, like consuming AWS (Amazon cloud) or Microsoft cloud.
All of the new infrastructure going into these edge environments (factories and so on) has to be ‘deploy and forget’, so once it has been put in, it can manage itself, self-heal etc. When something does go wrong, which is unfortunately inevitable with physical hardware, it will just get swapped out without the customer even having to know about it. If organizations are prepared to let go of the reigns a bit, and I think they’re used to doing it because they’ve done it with cloud, then they’re going to get the similar benefits from edge as they have been able to achieve with the cloud.
It’s a shift in thinking from that craft mentality to operationalizing and professionalizing how they’re doing things — working with an outside provider who is going to give them all of this so that they can focus on the applications that sit on top and provide the business benefit.
Litwin: Where can folks learn more about how you are working to enable this transition to Industry 4.0 as well as support some of these more long-term enterprise-level IoT deployments?
Metreweli: People can visit the Sunlight website at sunlight.io and there’s plenty of information on there about how to move to this Edge-as-a-Service model. We work with a number of partner in North America and across Europe who can deliver this to end customers. We’re also always happy to talk to organizations who have specific projects they’re looking to achieve or are looking for a more holistic solution to base their entire IoT infrastructure on. Do come and get in touch.
Watch the full discussion between Litwin and Metreweli on demand (28.48 minutes in)
More on Industry 4.0 with MarketScale and Kosten Metreweli, alongside spokespeople from Paragon Innovations, Beaird Supply Chain and Operational Solutions, ARC Specialties, and Red Lion.
