According to IoT Analytics’ recent research, today there are over 300 so-called IoT platforms. So, how is it possible to weed through all of the solutions out there, and select the right IoT platform to suit your business’s unique needs?
Before you start researching the IoT platform landscape you should try to answer the following questions:
1. How many IoT projects are you going to have?
If you’re planning to have many IoT projects and manage them in one single platform, then your list of relevant IoT platforms is significantly shorter. Most of the IoT platforms treat each IoT project as a different instance of the platform.
Managing many IoT projects in a single platform requires a special hierarchical architecture and advanced authorization mechanism. The hierarchical architecture enables the IoT platform users to manage their projects in a multi-level & dynamic hierarchy. In addition, different users and roles will have different permissions in the projects’ hierarchy.
2. Who’s going to customize your IoT projects?
When you purchase an IoT platform, usually you don’t expect it to be an out-of-the-box solution, prepared for your unique IoT project. Every IoT project has its own very specific business logic and the IoT platform vendors cannot support, or even think of all the different, complex business logic for all potential, future customers. So you’ll probably have to customize your IoT applications using either your own developers (in-house or outsourced) or use the IoT platform vendor’s professional services. When you purchase an IoT platform you usually get few PS hours as part of the platform suite, but you always need more hours awhich need to be taken into consideration.
Customizing your IoT application using DevOps would be your best choice, so you should understand in advance what your business logic requirements are, and which ones are supported out-of-the-box by the IoT platform. Whatever is not supported, you’ll have to implement by yourself whether in-house or using the vendor’s professional services group.
If you use your own developers for customizing the business logic, then you should verify that the IoT platform enables your developers to inject their code into your IoT application. In this case, the platform should provide you with an IDE to manage your code, upload it, and update it with new versions. The platform should provide you with separate QA, staging and production environment for your application life cycle management (ALM).
Another option is to use the platform vendor’s professional services resources. They know their product very well, and are very experienced. However, this is known to be the most expensive option to customize IoT projects. This also make you dependent upon 3rd party resources each time you have a new project or request. Moreover, if you have many IoT projects, then your expenses go way up.
3. How do you connect your IoT projects’ to other applications?
An IoT project is not a standalone project. A great part of having an IoT project, is integrating the data with other business applications, such as: ERP, CRM, PLM and many more, to create new business opportunities. Before purchasing an IoT platform you should list your other business applications, and verify that the IoT platform enables the transformation of data into and out of them. For each business application plugin that does not exist, you’ll have to develop on your own or use additional PS resources.
In addition, sometimes you want to extend your IoT project by connecting it to other advanced and business specific platforms to better analyze and use your data. Such platforms can be: BI, advanced analytics, machine learning and more. Only few of the existing IoT platforms expose interfaces to external resources.
There are cases when you already have a running piece of code that provides valuable business information and you want to stream this data into your IoT project or stream your IoT project’s data as input to this service. Make sure your chosen IoT platform supports extending data transformation in both ways – in and out.
If you plan to connect your IoT projects to your business applications and external services (yours or a 3rd party’s) you should look for an flexible and dynamic IoT platform, that will enable you to connect your IoT project to additional services currently and in the future, regardless of the service or device.
For more information about Axonize, a disruptive architecture purposely designed to enable deployment of complete and fully customized solutions across all applications, verticals and device types in mere days, click below to schedule your demo.
