tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16552161991556175852024-02-08T01:55:07.253+00:00The Wireless NoodleA podcast focused on disruptive technologies and their impact on business, from Matt Hatton, Founding Partner at Transforma Insights and technology analyst.Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.comBlogger220125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-34727610380162057942022-09-21T07:04:00.000+01:002022-09-21T07:04:21.891+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 31: Does Matter matter?<p>This week’s episode examines several interesting standards relevant to connectivity and IoT. First are Matter and Thread, which collectively promise to drive the smart home market. Additionally Matt looks at the 5G Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) and the Lightweight M2M (LwM2M) device management protocol. </p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/does-matter-matter/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDmWLBEolP0n5PoUFBKWQ9FyqGC5FPd9CaMCxhFzFRV-BIefuFzdguoGRhmTjUy7pz7h4zdRXxa38EDCkijdtM0DIjKX9q4LTK_-xzyHN1nB9h1_hNuBSX7BVfY1Q1fkOGBL7GEgjRYDYd1uQQRoWS31Z3GxYGsurTM0C1YP3pdedS28lzbQPDNl3bpg/s2043/woman-sitting-on-the-floor-using-a-laptop2043x903.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="903" data-original-width="2043" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDmWLBEolP0n5PoUFBKWQ9FyqGC5FPd9CaMCxhFzFRV-BIefuFzdguoGRhmTjUy7pz7h4zdRXxa38EDCkijdtM0DIjKX9q4LTK_-xzyHN1nB9h1_hNuBSX7BVfY1Q1fkOGBL7GEgjRYDYd1uQQRoWS31Z3GxYGsurTM0C1YP3pdedS28lzbQPDNl3bpg/w400-h176/woman-sitting-on-the-floor-using-a-laptop2043x903.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. This week I’ll be drilling into some interesting IoT technologies. First up is the new emerging standards for connected home, Matter and Thread. Then something a little technical in the form of 5G Network Data Analytics function (NWDAF). Finally a look at Lightweight M2M, the standard for device management, particularly relevant for constrained IoT devices.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Smart home: Matter and Thread</h1><p>The smart home market has been perpetually on the cusp of explosion for the last decade or two. However, with the exception of point solutions such as Amazon Echo, Nest and Ring adoption has been relatively slow. While there may be appealing individual devices no-one has quite cracked the creation of a smart home ecosystem supporting multiple device types. Samsung SmartThings is perhaps the closest. It is possible that this is set to change with the arrival of two standards: Matter and Thread.</p><p>Matter is a smart home interoperability protocol developed by the Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP) working group within the <a href="https://csa-iot.org/">Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA)</a>. The CSA was formerly the Zigbee Alliance but expanded its scope beyond the core Zigbee technology. Its membership includes Amazon, Apple, Google, Huawei, Legrand, NXP, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric and Signify. </p><p>The fully open Matter 1.0 standard will allow for compatibility between smart home devices. Matter does not create a new communications technology, but instead uses existing standards in the form of Ethernet, WiFi and Thread.</p><p>Matter 1.0 will be released in late 2022, having been delayed due to expansion in testing and validation. Ahead of the official launch, several of the members have begun pre-release testing of devices from various vendors. Reportedly Matter ended 2021 with 130 devices. </p><p>The list of vendors that have announced support for Matter is extensive, including the usual smart home suspects, Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, as well as a broad range of others including Philips Hue, Yale Home, Arlo, Bosch, Danfoss, Ikea, GE, Johnson Controls, LG, Lidl and Osram.</p><p>For developers, Matter eases the challenges of building products that are compatible with Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung and other environments, allowing the user to manage them from any platform. For consumers, logos will be used to acknowledge certified devices and they will not be tied to closed systems supported by single vendors.</p><p>Matter promises to be the default networking technology for smart home.</p><p>One of the key things that Matter does is to make the Thread standard more important. It is one of the few communications protocols supported by Matter.</p><p><a href="https://www.threadgroup.org/What-is-Thread/Thread-Benefits">Thread</a> was developed in 2014 by a group of vendors including ARM, Nest Labs and Samsung, and later Apple, as a low-power self-healing mesh network to support IoT devices. It is based on the 802.15.4-2006 standard, similar to Zigbee and BLE. The addition of Apple has been notable because it has always shied away from supporting Zigbee, favouring solely WiFi and Bluetooth. </p><p>Thread’s big advantage over WiFi is that power consumption can be tiny. By virtue of a highly optimised set of protocols (IP, UDP, 6LoWPAN) packet overheads are small (sub-100 bytes) and handshakes and polling are minimised, giving long battery life. </p><p>Compared to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and specifically the mesh version BLE Mesh, performance is more similar. But, the critical challenge for BLE is in the support it receives from vendors. The likes of Apple, Google and Samsung are very much favouring Thread. Add to this that it’s not supported by Matter, other than for initial configuration. </p><p>But, it has to be said, there is currently quite a limited range of devices that support Thread.</p><p>The arrival of a new set of commonly adopted standards raises the prospect of an acceleration in the growth of the connected home. It won’t be an overnight explosion, simply due to the inherent inertia related to installing smart devices in the home, typically only at the point when older legacy devices such as lighting, air-conditioning or white goods are replaced. </p><p> Doing a little number crunching in <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/matter-thread-smart-home">the report</a>, based on the hyper-granular data in the <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/tam/market">Transforma Insights IoT Forecast Database</a>, we found that smart home applications will account for 40% of all IoT devices by 2030 (up from 37% in 2020). The smart home is growing even faster than the overall IoT market, particularly between now and 2025. A key part of the growth over the next ten years is in the increasing availability of standardised open ecosystems that simplify the process of developing IoT devices and provide certainty for the end user over interoperability. The connected home is continuing to move away from closed systems based on single vendors. Matter is a critical element in this, and Thread also to a lesser extent.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">5G NWDAF</h1><p>Next up Network Data Analytics Function, or NWDAF. For those of you who tuned in to Episode 3 you’ll remember I spoke about how true innovation in any given technology sector requires the separation of the hardware layer from software/control. This innovation then translates into an explosion of adoption of products and services. Similar trends are manifesting in other sectors today through the concept of IT/OT convergence. With technology developments such as Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), 5G’s Services Based Architecture and NWDAF, we see this trend also play out in the telecoms sector.</p><p>One of the key features of 5G is that it creates a modular Service-Based Architecture delivered through Network Functions (NFs). Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) allows the data from those NFs to be analysed and functions to be automated. This presents the possibility of enabling and accelerating innovation in new services through exposing the insights and functionality delivered via 5G networks. By doing so, NWDAF holds the key to releasing some of the value of 5G.</p><p>So, what is NWDAF? </p><p>Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) is a set of functionality specified in 3GPP’s release 16, which was frozen in July 2020. NWDAF is part of 5G’s Service-Based Architecture (SBA) which sees the control plane functions delivered through a set of modular software-based ‘Network Functions’ (NFs) relating to the different elements of the operation of the network (e.g. authentication, session management or policy control), each able to access other NFs through standardised APIs. NWDAF involves the application of analytics to these functions of the 5G core network to analyse and automate core network functions and operations, including introducing predictive capabilities. Historically MNOs relied on network probes to monitor the function of the network, whereas NWDAF collects data natively from various NFs, and, via an orchestrator, is able to ‘close the loop’ and automatically make changes to network functions as necessary.</p><p>This functionality allows for a range of analytics capabilities (some involving AI/ML) to be applied to network functionality. These include: load analytics and prediction for different network functions, network performance analytics, including load performance and future predictions, data congestion analytics, and network slice management, in terms of load-level calculation.</p><p>In addition to the present analytics function it also allows for open APIs to third party developers, to build analytics functions on top of the data, and to end users.</p><p>The opportunities from this technology are quite substantial. The main on is cost savings through more efficient operations. It provides for mobile network operators to improve efficiency of network operations, for instance by anomaly detection or network optimisation and resource allocation being used to avoid congestion, rather than having to invest further in sites and/or spectrum.</p><p>However, few MNOs will be content simply with cost savings as a justification for implementing 5G. They will look additionally for revenue opportunities. The aforementioned predictive behaviour analysis and avoidance of congestion could be monetised through the delivery of superior grade-of-service, quality of experience (QoE), or a tailored service reflecting a preferred trade-off for the customer. As an example of the latter, there are likely to be devices that would prioritise coverage over bandwidth, or latency over cost.</p><p>Also, they could offer enhanced guarantees over quality of services (QoS). This is one of the keys to unlocking the enterprise opportunity. For many use cases, enterprises are entrusting their mission-critical applications to a mobile network, for instance in industrial IoT use cases, or delivering a guaranteed feed for encrypted video footage. Offering nothing better than a best-effort service is not compatible with that aim.</p><p>I don’t plan on addressing network slicing here, but NWDAF capabilities are also good for supporting slicing. </p><p>Of course, it’s not all plan sailing. There’s legacy networks in the form of LTE, which won’t support the functionality. There’s also a whole load of other standards and technologies that perform similar functions. Plus privacy and policy management challenges crop up, particularly when AI is used. </p><p>NWDAF is interesting, but perhaps one to really concern ourselves with in about 5 years time.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Lightweight M2M</h1><p>Finally, <a href="https://omaspecworks.org/what-is-oma-specworks/iot/lightweight-m2m-lwm2m/">Lightweight M2M</a>. What is it? It’s a device management protocol. It was developed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), which previously developed the OMA-DM standard for phones. OMA reinvented the OMA-DM standard to be more appropriate for IoT, as LwM2M. It is built on the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) on top of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) with RESTful APIs for device management, exposing device management resources such as security, connectivity, location and firmware upgrades.</p><p>LwM2M is a favoured device management protocol for use with constrained devices using NB-IoT and LTE-M technologies, and also to a lesser extent on LTE Cat-1 and Cat-0 devices.</p><p>There are some limitations to LwM2M. Its security is based on Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS). Historically, cloud platforms prefer data delivery using MQTT with Transport Layer Security (TLS), or similar. However, MQTT is based on the connection-oriented TCP, and uses TLS for its security, which is also a heavy protocol. LwM2M uses UDP and its associated security protocol, DTLS.</p><p>There are a few alternatives to LwM2M for device management. The first is to use vendor-specific device management capabilities, typically based on MQTT. There are numerous examples here, including Digi’s Remote Manager, Telit’s DeviceWISE or Sierra Wireless’ AirVantage .</p><p>The other standards that might be relevant have really not been designed for IoT devices, although they are appropriate in the context of less constrained devices, for instance those using 4G and 5G, or ethernet. These include:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Open Mobile Alliance Device Management (OMA-DM) is designed for devices with more resources, including gateways, routers, connected cars and other less-constrained devices.</li><li>TR-069 (or Technical Report 069) is a specification from the Broadband Forum for remote management of broadband customer premises equipment (CPE). </li><li>TR-369, also known as ‘User Services Platform’ (USP), is the successor to TR-069, extending the device management functionality to IoT devices.</li></ul><p></p><p>None of these other alternatives is really designed for constrained devices. The proprietary approaches using MQTT are the closest, but as noted before, this being a connection-oriented protocol based on TCP makes is inappropriate for constrained devices that need to minimise communication to maintain battery life.</p><p>Quite a few vendors support LwM2M. Technically speaking LwM2M is available on more or less all cellular devices to manage firmware for the modem, by virtue of the requirement from AT&T and Verizon in the US that it be included for that purpose. However, the implementation is somewhat clumsy, relying on AT commands. Communications Service Providers are big advocates, typically, and some enterprise end users in sectors like smart metering and lighting are advocating for it.</p><p>In the recent report ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/lightweight-m2m-what-how-widespread">Lightweight M2M (LwM2M): what is it and how widespread is its use?</a>’ we also forecast how widely adopted it will be. Today not huge, but becoming significant over the next 10 years.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Next week (or possibly a few weeks from now)</h1><p>If 5G floats your boat, and particularly if you’re interested in the emerging space of mobile private networks, aka private wireless, I recommend you register for our webinar on the 26th September when I’ll share perspectives on both topics and how they overlap. Link: '<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/webinar-5g-mpn-september22">A marriage made on the campus? Developments in 5G and private networks and how they come together</a>'.</p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>I’m currently on my travels at various conferences and events over September and October so won’t have much time for pulling together a podcast episode. But I’m sure I’ll have a lot to report when I get back. So there may not be an episode for a few weeks. But I’m sure I’ll come armed with lots of thoughts from <a href="https://www.mwclasvegas.com/">MWC Las Vegas</a>, <a href="https://www.iottechexpo.com/">IoT Tech Expo</a>, <a href="https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/conference/">The Things Conference</a>, and many more shows. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-64922472828340498302022-09-13T07:19:00.003+01:002022-09-13T07:19:53.146+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 30: Cloud connectors and who's hot in IoT?<p>In this week’s episode Matt looks at the emerging requirement in IoT for cloud connetors, as well as the associated topic of IoT SAFE. He also digs into findings from a survey last year on who are the most (and least) favoured vendors in IoT. Finally he shares some of the findings from Transforma Insights' work on connected cars.</p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/cloud-connectors-whos-hot/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below:</p><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. Today I want to look at a few diverse areas, all related to IoT. The first is the concept of cloud connectors. This is an area we’ve been digging into quite a bit recently and it’s worth exploring. And I’ll also look a little at something called IoT SAFE, which is a related topic. Second, I want to share some findings from a survey we did actually last year, but it makes for interesting reading, related to which are the vendors in IoT that are most favoured by IoT adopters. Finally a quick run through some forecasts we at Transforma Insights did looking at connected cars. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbsbOsmtMwtcCkTWluNmOkJHncluQDgfWzZ9EN_JaXHzINF-o6eIOqRcUdWqWsCvinsspWfAZL3o6V7jmG3bsHNUHAFqKmcEQ10cuWy-p0kBC5VtHB5biYSoPAAC59wPPF-mUGW_Xf0BcSyp5ea-W14KGS3SMRmjFaTJmOJcE0BphYFH_5BnJXuOEo_g/s3471/pexels-pixabay-52531.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1271" data-original-width="3471" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbsbOsmtMwtcCkTWluNmOkJHncluQDgfWzZ9EN_JaXHzINF-o6eIOqRcUdWqWsCvinsspWfAZL3o6V7jmG3bsHNUHAFqKmcEQ10cuWy-p0kBC5VtHB5biYSoPAAC59wPPF-mUGW_Xf0BcSyp5ea-W14KGS3SMRmjFaTJmOJcE0BphYFH_5BnJXuOEo_g/w400-h146/pexels-pixabay-52531.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><h1 style="text-align: left;">Cloud Connectors</h1><p>The concept of the IoT cloud connector has recently emerged as a differentiator for cellular connectivity providers and IoT platform vendors as mechanism for more easily delivering data from IoT devices into cloud platforms which are increasingly hosting IoT application data. The key role is to apply the appropriate protocols and security demanded by the cloud platforms and to deliver the data as seamlessly as possible. </p><p>In a <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/cloud-connectors-matter-iot">recent report</a> we looked at the reasons for the surging demand for cloud connectors, most notably the growing adoption of constrained IoT connectivity, and the functionality that the connectors deliver. It also examines the approach taken by some of the leading providers of this functionality, including connectivity providers, IoT platform vendors and vendors of device management solutions, and we also consider the commercial angle, including considerations of the expected demand for such capabilities, the positioning of this functionality and the competitive landscape.</p><p>There are three main trends driving the increasing demand for cloud connectors: the greater use of cloud when architecting IoT solutions, increasing reliance on constrained connectivity technologies and the demands of cloud providers relating to how data is delivered to them. The combination of these three factors create the requirement for cloud connectors. </p><p>First up, the growing use of the cloud. Put simply, more and more IoT applications need to deliver data to the cloud. While most IoT applications continue to deliver to on-premises servers, anecdotally the proportion shifting to the cloud is quite rapidly accelerating and within the next 5 years the majority of IoT applications will be hosted with the likes of AWS, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.</p><p>The benefits of using cloud are clear in terms of scalability and simpler integration of data storage and analysis. This is particularly exacerbated by the growing interest of the cloud providers in building their IoT capabilities, including aspects such as edge computing. </p><p>Another major trend in IoT is the increasing adoption of Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies for connecting devices, including LoRaWAN, Sigfox, NB-IoT and LTE-M . According to Transforma Insights’ <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/tam/market">IoT Forecast Database</a>, by the end of 2030 there will be over 4 billion devices connected using these technologies, up from a few hundred thousand today. </p><p>These technologies are deliberately designed to reduce cost and maximise battery life by reducing the functionality in terms of data throughput and frequency of communication. In so doing, these constrained LPWA connections tend to make use of a specific set of protocols designed for ‘connectionless’ rather than ‘connection-oriented’ communication . For instance, they tend to use the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) over User Datagram Protocol. The main alternative to CoAP is MQTT, but typically it would be inappropriate to use that as a technology in these constrained networks because they are much ‘chattier’, generating much more overhead. Up to 90% of the energy in sending MQTT messages is consumed just by the protocol handshake. For devices with no power constraints it’s fine to use MQTT. With power-constrained devices, generally it’s not. </p><p>The use of these constrained IoT devices (which I talked about a fair bit a couple of weeks ago) creates a bit of a headache for the cloud providers. The major cloud platforms support only a limited number of protocols for data delivery. All of them require the use of TCP-based protocols, rather than the UDP-based which are favoured by the constrained NB-IoT and LTE-M, and they all require encryption. Constrained devices cannot support end-to-end encryption (as it necessitates a much more data/battery intensive handshake for authentication) and cannot connect directly into public clouds. </p><p>These requirements from the cloud providers do not existing in a vacuum. There has been a gradual increase in the requirements for higher levels of security across the IoT and these requirements for superior levels of encryption reflect that.</p><p>As a result of not being able to deliver data using ‘other’ protocols into the cloud there is a requirement for a ‘cloud connector’, i.e. an element on the network where the data is adapted for delivery into the cloud. It handles encryption using DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security) and protocol conversion (typically from a third-party vendor such as IoTerop, Friendly Technologies, Tartabit or AVsystems).</p><p>Effectively this means that the transport layer security is applied from a point on the operator’s network (typically the connectivity management platform), with a reliance on network layer security within the network perimeter and up to that network node. In the report we go into some of the possible architectures.</p><p>The cloud connector functionality would typically sit at the operator’s Connectivity Management Platform (CMP) as the natural aggregation point.</p><p>So, the rise of constrained devices and the increasing demand for cloud integration will certainly drive the need for cloud connectors. These will become table-stakes functionality for serious connectivity providers. Direct monetisation will be difficult; they will instead form part of a set of functionality (spanning hardware, connectivity, application and more) positioning the provider as a trusted application optimiser. I talked about this back in Episode 28. Further to this, we will see more and more connectivity providers adopting cloud-native approaches to provide more seamless access for clients to cloud functions. </p><h1 style="text-align: left;">IoT SAFE</h1><p>There’s also another related topic which has been the basis of another report I wrote recently, that’s IoT SAFE. </p><p>The ‘IoT SIM Applet For secure End-to-end communication’ (IoT SAFE) is a mechanism for ensuring end-to-end security for IoT data flows, from device to cloud. It establishes the SIM card (or potentially any other secure element) as a hardware ‘Root of Trust’, i.e. a source that can always be trusted. The IoT SAFE SIM removes the requirement for a dedicated hardware security module (HSM) and places its security function within the SIM card.</p><p>A software application is installed on the SIM to store private keys and certificates to authenticate the end device and provide credentials for the IoT application. It establishes Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) sessions with the other end point (typically a cloud server). </p><p>To ensure that communications over a public network are secure between end-points (e.g. an IoT device and a cloud server), both are given associated keys. The management of these keys has to be handled very carefully to ensure no security slips. In the case of IoT SAFE they can either be provisioned at time of manufacture or established by the mobile network operator or other service provider over-the-air remotely. In either case this allows for mutual authentication between the device and the cloud.</p><p>Essentially, IoT SAFE is about applying to end-to-end transport a similarly high level of security that SIM brought to network access. Rather than just authenticating the SIM onto the network, this authenticates the IoT application into the cloud. So, highly relevant in the context of cloud connectors.</p><p>IoT SAFE offers an upgrade on security for IoT devices and particularly for the increasing number delivering data directly into the cloud. It also helps with scalability of the provisioning of such devices. There are alternatives that are more applicable to constrained devices, in the form of cloud connectors, and demand is as yet unproven. While enterprises often highlight security as their greatest concern, it remains to be seen if they will embrace additional layers that come with some associated costs.</p><p>Check out the report we published on exactly this topic: '<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/iot-safe-greater-security-cellular">IoT SAFE promises greater security for cellular IoT deployments but demand remains unproven</a>'.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Who’s hot and who’s not in IoT?</h1><p>Back in March Transforma Insights published a report ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/hyperscale-cloud-top-vendors-enterprise-iot">Hyperscale cloud providers are rated as top vendors by enterprise IoT adopters</a>’ which looked at enterprise IoT adopters’ attitudes towards dozens of leading IoT vendors and the extent to which they were aware of and keen to use their products and services. The report includes a lot of analysis of the opinions of those enterprise IoT adopters, including which vendors’ IoT offerings they are aware of, which they have used, and which they would use again.</p><p>The report was based on a survey we did back in 2021. And we’re launching a 2022 into field now, looking at specifically connectivity providers.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Who are the most preferred vendors in IoT?</h2><p>But what did the 2021 survey tell us? Well, firstly there is a notable top tier of vendors encompassing major IT vendors, particularly cloud providers, and a couple of communications service providers. The top 5 consists of Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM and AT&T, all of which score very well in terms of awareness of the products and interest in using again. Others in the top 10 include AWS, SAP and Verizon.</p><p>Overall, there is a very strong correlation between organisations using a particular vendor and their willingness to recommend them. There are two implications here. Firstly, that there is a group of vendors with which adopters have an established relationship and whose services they almost inevitably anticipate using in future. The second is that smaller vendors find it harder to establish stickiness with their customers. There are a few vendors that buck this trend and score relatively well on reuse despite not being particularly widely used, namely Deloitte, Deutsche Telekom and Verizon.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">And who are the least preferred?</h2><p>The reverse of the analysis is to look at a ranking of vendors by the proportion of respondents who have said they use them but would not use them again. The companies that score highest (or lowest, depending how you look at it) tend to comprise smaller IoT platform providers, such as Particle and C3.ai, and IoT MVNOs, such as Pelion, Aeris and Kore.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Connected cars</h1><p>Back in June, Transforma Insights published our '<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/connected-car-overview-2020-2030">Connected Car Overview, 2020-2030</a>' report, which provides a summary of our view across all of the various connected vehicle applications. I thought it was worth sharing a few highlights as it’s one of the hottest spaces in IoT. </p><p>In total the connected car space will grow to 2.5 billion connections by 2030. The single most important Application Group within the space is Vehicle Head Units, i.e. the factory fit telematics unit. Our recently published report on the subject will show 1.8 billion connected vehicles in 2030. In addition to this our Connected Car Overview report takes a more holistic view of the market and includes a further 0.7 billion aftermarket devices as part of its figures.</p><p>For mobile network operators, the connected car is one of the most significant sectors. It accounts for 28% of cellular connections at the end of 2021, falling only slightly to 26% in 2030. As a sector with a large number of mobile, high bandwidth cellular connections it’s perhaps unsurprising that Connected Car contributes 23% to overall IoT spend in 2030, despite having less than an 8% share of all IoT devices.</p><p>The automotive sector will be particularly important for 5G. Over 58% of 5G 'non-mMTC' (i.e. excluding the Low Power Wide Area technologies) connections in 2030 will be found in connected cars. Even so, LTE will still account for more new vehicles in 2030 than 5G does.</p><p>Of course, whilst connected cars are important for 5G, it is becoming increasingly likely that 5G will become equally important for the automotive space. Although IoT in the automotive space is now a fairly well understood and mature market, the 5G features around ultra reliable low latency communication (URLLC) has a crucial role in supporting vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. If you want more of an explainer on that functionality, check out our page on <a href="https://transformainsights.com/5g-iot">5G IoT</a>. </p><p>These technologies are likely to play an expanding role in enhanced safety features in all vehicles, and will be vital for the successful operation of autonomous vehicles in the future. This will eventually become a driving force behind the adoption of 5G in new vehicles. That said, it’s easy to overstate the importance of connectivity technology in autonomous vehicles. They need to work autonomously whether or not they have connectivity. So, while 5G (or even 4G) connectivity is important, it can’t be something on which the vehicle relies.</p><p>All interesting stuff. Check out our various reports linked from a recent blog post. Link on the wirelessnoodle.com ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/connected-cars-cellular-iot-5g">Connected cars will hit 2.5 billion connections in 2030, driving cellular IoT and 5G adoption</a>’.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Next week</h1><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>Next week I’ll be talking about a few interesting IoT protocols and functions. Specifically Matter and Thread which promise to open things up in the connected home, NWDAF which is an intriguing feature of 5G (but perhaps one for the future) and Lightweight M2M, the standard for device management.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-38957358784447367322022-09-08T04:58:00.000+01:002022-09-08T04:58:00.553+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 29: Predicting AI<p>In this week’s episode Matt looks at a new set of research from Transforma Insights on forecasting the Artificial Intelligence market, considers the value and potential of 5G RedCap, a new variant on 5G aimed specifically at IoT, and examines the growing need for smart metering given the current energy crisis. </p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/forecasting-ai/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below:</p><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. In this episode I want to focus on one new interesting area of research for us, that of forecasting the Artificial Intelligence market, something about which we have a unique perspective. Back to the more core stuff for us, I also take a look at 5G RedCap, a new variant on 5G aimed specifically at addressing the needs of IoT. Is it any good? Will it find a niche? And finally a look at some forecasts the team at Transforma Insights has completed recently on the smart metering market. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPSiLEjkrUbMTkI5SBVcNCiAmXk4oXCMNgePNWptltfhaW7AFS9_EBFo8xMKFaupdb8sS8b4RUf3Wb32KMltndSXoqim-V9nMZrvbZdDlIyMZkfeTcjIYnGHjbl9Anlf6kwL86vmbBz1J8WOGGpbTacJGaqEQkQzyYbrBO3Mu1ICRdOSDdcXqY-TrrBQ/s1280/pexels-rui-dias-12499181.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="558" data-original-width="1280" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPSiLEjkrUbMTkI5SBVcNCiAmXk4oXCMNgePNWptltfhaW7AFS9_EBFo8xMKFaupdb8sS8b4RUf3Wb32KMltndSXoqim-V9nMZrvbZdDlIyMZkfeTcjIYnGHjbl9Anlf6kwL86vmbBz1J8WOGGpbTacJGaqEQkQzyYbrBO3Mu1ICRdOSDdcXqY-TrrBQ/w400-h175/pexels-rui-dias-12499181.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><h1 style="text-align: left;">Ten-fold increase in AI use by 2030</h1><p>Artificial Intelligence, and all its sub-components, is one of the most intriguing and potentially transformational of the currently emerging technology areas that we track at Transforma Insights. Earlier in the year we <a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/iot-dominate-ai-forecast">unveiled our forecasts</a> for how we see the trajectory of deployments, including which device types it will be deployed on, which will be the dominant use cases, and which countries and vertical sectors will see the greatest use of AI. </p><h2 style="text-align: left;">How big will AI be?</h2><p>Firstly a note about what we’re forecasting. When we look at AI market growth, we look at the number of instances of AI that will be deployed. Instances are the best way to understand the market growth because they paint a true picture of the importance of each use type and how they are deployed. Measuring revenue is painful. Does revenue measure the spending by companies on AI? Or the cost savings associated with it (as most AI is aimed at doing the same things cheaper? Or the total revenue associated with use cases that make use of some form of AI, even if it is only a small part of that implementation? Using revenue as the metric doesn’t really reflect how and where AI is really used. </p><p>We analysed dozens of different use cases across all vertical sectors in every country. Based on that analysis we believe that there are currently 1.8 billion instances of AI deployed globally. By 2030 we expect this to grow to 21 billion, a more than ten-fold growth. </p><h2 style="text-align: left;">IoT dominates AI instances</h2><p>Of those 21 billion AI instances in 2030, around 99% will be deployed on Internet of Things (IoT) devices, a figure that doesn’t change much across the forecast period. The other device types, cloud, handsets/tablets/PCs, and edge computing nodes, will account collectively for just 1%. But we shouldn’t necessarily equate that with value. Those AI instances deployed in non-IoT devices may be individually more impactful. For instance, a chat-bot deployment in the cloud may serve millions of unique users. Contrast that with AI deployed in an autonomous vehicle which will be predominantly relevant only to the vehicle upon which it is deployed (although it will be very relevant to other nearby vehicles). </p><p> Consumer products will account for the vast majority of IoT AI instances. ‘AV Equipment’ such as smart TVs is the single biggest use case, along with connected cars and personal electronics. Other big ones are those related to security and public safety, including significant adoption in CCTV for the purposes of behaviour analysis and identify public safety threats. Many IoT devices, including autonomous vehicles, AR/VR devices and delivery robots, will all require some form of AI. As IoT use cases grow, so will the requirement for AI.</p><p>The Transforma Insights analysis also includes equally granular assessment of each of the other device types. For instance, cloud deployments will tend to focus on enterprise-wide requirements, dominated by two main use cases. Firstly, those related to IT security, such as identifying hacking attempts and phishing. Secondly, those associated with business efficiency such as robotic process automation, workflow optimisation and other business processes.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Where will AI see the biggest adoption?</h2><p>Our numbers are built on a country-by-country basis meaning we are able to identify which countries will see the greatest adoption. China and the US will lead the way, collectively accounting for 54% of AI instances. This means that those two countries are over-indexing even relative to their shares of the global economy. </p><h1 style="text-align: left;">5G RedCap: a technology without a USP</h1><p>There’s been a lot of talk about how <a href="https://transformainsights.com/5g-iot">5G can be used for IoT</a>. In fact a lot of vendors have tried to set up 5G as the key use case for it. But, as we’ve seen with our forecasts, true high bandwidth, low latency, 5G is only really useful for a few use cases and volumes aren’t great. What we’re expecting bigger things of is NB-IoT and LTE-M, neither of which is really a 5G technology but both of which have been dragged kicking and screaming into the standard. But recently, a new variant of 5G proper has cropped up, in the form of 5G RedCap which is intended to be a low power variant of 5G new radio. But we’re sceptical at the moment. </p><p>As a bit of background, the latest iteration of the 3GPP standards for mobile communications, Release 17, includes a new variant of 5G aimed specifically at IoT. It’s defined as ‘5G Reduced Capability NR’ (or RedCap for short), or sometimes ‘NR-Light’. It’s an interesting evolution, to try to create a lower complexity 5G New Radio device, with the intent of doing for 5G NR what LTE-M and NB-IoT did for LTE. However, with this iteration, and likely for at least a decade to come, it is highly unlikely to have a significant impact on the connectivity technology market landscape. In July 2022 we at Transforma Insights published a report entitled ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/5g-redcap-portfolio-cellular-iot">What is 5G RedCap and how does it fit into the portfolio of cellular IoT connectivity technologies?</a>’ which explained exactly why.</p><p>5G RedCap promises to be the 5G New Radio equivalent of the mMTC technologies NB-IoT and LTE-M, delivering on three aims. </p><p>The first was to reduce the complexity of the devices and therefore the cost. At hundreds of dollars per module, 5G is completely out of reach of all but a very few IoT use cases. That compares to typically USD10-40 for LTE devices, depending on category, and around USD5 for NB-IoT. 5G RedCap has been somewhat successful here, recording a price reduction of perhaps 80%. </p><p>The second aim was to reduce power consumption. To fill a useful niche RedCap needs to be capable of running of a battery. Reports are that power savings of over 90% are possible. </p><p>The third aim was to maintain data speeds of at least those of LTE Cat-1. With speed of 85Mbit/s it comfortably does that. </p><p>None of these capabilities really opens up a significant part of the market. What is noticeable for anyone looking closely at IoT use cases, as we do in our highly granular IoT Forecasts, is that IoT applications bifurcate, with some requiring high data rates (e.g. CCTV or connected car) and the remainder, accounting for the vast majority of use cases, needing low cost and often battery power. To put it into the terminology of 5G: IoT applications either need eMBB (enhanced Mobile Broadband) or mMTC (massive Machine Type Communications), but rarely both. And today almost nothing demands the third leg of the 5G stool, URLLC (Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication), certainly not large scale mass-market applications. While there is ‘clear blue water’ between the capabilities of 5G RedCap and other technologies, that doesn’t mean there is a big opportunity there. </p><p>The question is: is there demand for a mid-range technology? Our analysis suggests not. 5G Redcap ‘falls between two stools’ with middling capabilities that are not optimised for anything. </p><p>Furthermore, it's worth noting that 5G RedCap’s main challenger is LTE Cat 4 which is both faster and cheaper, albeit that RedCap supports lower latency and a greater set of frequency bands. Fast and cheap trumps both of those capabilities, by a long way. And on the question of cost, it falls short of NB-IoT and LTE-M, by an order of magnitude. </p><p>There is a logic to adding a lower complexity variant of 5G NR at a more cost-effective price-point, with low power consumption and superior bandwidth and latency. Ultimately, and we’re talking more than 10 years, there will be a need to support low power devices on 5G NR RAN. But for the next decade battery powered cellular IoT will be dominated by NB-IoT and LTE-M. We should note that Release 18 promises some further refinements, but they will need to be very significant to come close to the existing mMTC technologies. We expect something rather more incremental.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Energy security needs drive smart metering</h1><p>We’re all only too keenly aware that the war in Ukraine is having a big knock on effect on considerations of energy supply and security. Last year 40% of the gas Europeans burned came from Russia. The war has boosted already high prices of oil and gas globally and several countries have further reduced gas imports from Russia. It has been felt perhaps most in the EU, where governments have sought to reduce consumption and shift buying away from Russia. </p><p>For the last decade or more government in Europe has tried to reduce fuel consumption through influencing behaviour. This includes various fiscal measures such as reducing taxes on energy efficient heating systems and building insulation, and more efficient appliances and products. The use of Smart Electricity meters also plays a key role. The feedback on from smart meters on energy consumption should prompt investments by consumers in more energy-efficient technologies (such as low-energy refrigerators or freezers) as well as to encourage ‘good’ behaviour (such as switching off or reprogramming appliances). </p><p>The other aspect of reducing energy dependence is by diversifying to renewable sources. This is particularly the case in countries that have opted to end their nuclear power programmes, such as Germany. The use of renewable energy sources for electricity drives the need for ‘load balancing’ as the supply is often highly variable. Spikes in demand typically need to be addressed using the most polluting of generating facilities, typically coal fired power-stations (or even diesel generators). Smoothing out demand, so there are fewer less pronounced peaks, will mean that less use of the most polluting energy sources. Using smart metering to monitor and even control appliances in consumer setting, and influence behaviour patterns in industry, are critical. Another example where smart meters are useful in load balancing relates to Electric Vehicles (EV) charging. Equipped with an auxiliary load control switch, meters can send on and off commands across the home area network potentially allowing the electricity supplier to schedule the time for EV charging or even draw down the battery at peak time. This in turn helps user avoid car charging at peak time. </p><p>Back in July, Transforma Insights published our report on <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/electricity-smart-meters">electricity smart metering</a>. The report examines the reasons for the increase in installations along with detailed assessment of the progress of rollouts and the various communication technologies used across major geographies for these meters. In total there will be 2.2 billion electricity smart meters deployed by 2030, up from 814 million in 2020. The transition from traditional electricity meters to smart meters is one of the biggest IoT initiatives worldwide. </p><p> The arrival of new connectivity technologies will help to accelerate rollouts, as illustrated by the fact that the dominant connectivity technologies will be LPWA non-mMTC (33%) and 5G mMTC (26%) by 2030, both relatively new technology families. Although, it has to be said that this iteration of 5G RedCap is probably not going to be accounting for many of them! </p><p>[Additional to the discussion in the podcast, a link to an article on Enterprise IoT Insights sumarising further thoughts on this topic is <a href="https://enterpriseiotinsights.com/20220715/internet-of-things/switching-conserving-diversifying-the-global-iot-project-to-change-the-energy-mix-analyst-angle">here</a>]</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Next week</h1><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>A quick plug now for the events we’ll be at in the next few months.</p><p>If you’ll be at Industry of Things World in Berlin, IoT Tech Expo in Amsterdam, the Things Conference in Amsterdam, Mobile World Congress Las Vegas, or IoT Tech Expo in Santa Clara, let me know. All in September/October.</p><p>Link to our <a href="https://transformainsights.com/events">events page</a>, where we’ll be speaking, is posted on the wirelessnoodle.com page: </p><p>Next week I’ll be talking connected cars, cloud connectors and IoT SAFE. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-24368374595488943362022-09-01T14:15:00.004+01:002022-09-01T14:15:44.901+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 28: What is constrained IoT?<p>This week's episode looks at the concept of constrained IoT, delves into some recent headlines concerning particularly M&A in the IoT space, and a look at recent developments in embedded SIM. </p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/what-is-constrained-iot/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below:</p><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. This week I want to mostly delve into a particular aspect of IoT, related to cellular-connected devices and that’s the concept of ‘constrained IoT’. There’s also a bit from me about the fate of Sigfox (which is a good example of a constrained technology if ever there was one) as well as a look at some other news that’s been making the headlines and a dive into eSIM and iSIM. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvX69c9Eaj1nuy0R02EZktb_tNJhjUH5grQUwrYMKBYRd3D0p6bT6H2jkP9P7uuiYS32exefIpEhU04FkVuKK9XaC1dzY_cDlhRTOqnFb48nU1fO4fHyAiO1WiJo9OVjzebP_-ynZGa5N7uqxgM-a6a5Kj4tGEx8BlWWfCgFU7KzVYaOngD_tGnTD8qQ/s1280/pexels-travis-saylor-951408.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="526" data-original-width="1280" height="165" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvX69c9Eaj1nuy0R02EZktb_tNJhjUH5grQUwrYMKBYRd3D0p6bT6H2jkP9P7uuiYS32exefIpEhU04FkVuKK9XaC1dzY_cDlhRTOqnFb48nU1fO4fHyAiO1WiJo9OVjzebP_-ynZGa5N7uqxgM-a6a5Kj4tGEx8BlWWfCgFU7KzVYaOngD_tGnTD8qQ/w400-h165/pexels-travis-saylor-951408.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><h1 style="text-align: left;">Constrained IoT </h1><p>A few weeks ago I spoke about an<a href="https://www.iot-now.com/2022/07/11/122261-how-the-demands-of-constrained-iot-are-reshaping-the-connectivity-landscape/"> article I wrote in IoT Now</a> which is well worth a read. Well, I thought I’d run through some of the highlights for you dear listeners.</p><p>Increasingly, IoT is focused on addressing lots of devices in increasingly inhospitable environments. It does this by slimming down the features and functionality of the offering to make it more appropriate. Last year, we at Transforma Insights published a report on what we termed the ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/what-is-thin-iot">Thin IoT stack</a>’. It looked at a set of technologies across the IoT stack that are specifically aimed at dealing with the constraints of power, location, space, processing and several other factors. Across each of five layers of the IoT stack (device hardware, device software, networking, middleware, and edge computing and machine learning) there are optimum technologies including system-on-chip, chip-on-board, embedded operating systems such as TinyOS and RIOT, networking technologies such as MQTT, CoAP, and LPWA technologies, thin middleware, and data processing techniques such as TinyML. All of these elements of the IoT stack, that are now optimised for IoT are potentially useful for IoT deployments, and will provide a boost for the markets. If you’re interested in the Thin IoT concept more broadly, I recommend checking out the blog post '<a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/five-ps-constrain-iot-thin-iot-stack">The five ‘P’s that constrain IoT and necessitate the ‘Thin IoT’ stack</a>' I wrote on it recently. </p><p>Wide area connectivity for IoT is increasingly defined by the arrival of technologies to overcome constraints, particularly battery life. The whole reason for the development of Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies a decade ago or so was to operate where there are constraints on the availability of power. According to our <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/forecast/highlights">IoT forecasts</a> here at Transforma Insights, LPWA technologies (both licensed NB-IoT/LTE-M and unlicensed such as LoRaWAN) will account for 64% of all new public network connections in 2030. There is also a lot of hype today about the potential for low earth orbit (LEO) satellites to address IoT, something I spoke about in <a href="https://www.wirelessnoodle.com/2022/08/wireless-noodle-episode-25-hyperscale.html">Episode 25</a>.</p><p>Local area networking is also getting in on the act. WiFi has historically dominated this space, at least for indoor consumer connectivity. However, we expect Thread, off the back of the standardisation of the Matter smart home interoperability protocol, to become increasingly widely adopted. So be aware anyone not already working with Thread/Matter. You should be. Details of our recent report are here: '<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/matter-thread-smart-home ">Will Matter (and Thread) help vendors finally crack the smart home market?</a>'</p><p>The constraints of low bandwidth low power devices will also dictate the choice of protocols used. At the Transport Layer, most deployments will choose between the IP protocols Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). TCP is ‘connection-oriented’, i.e. it will need to establish two-way communications with the receiver, deliver data packets in the correct order and to resend any lost packets. In contrast, UDP is ‘connectionless’ meaning that it will send data packets without consideration of whether the recipient is ready and won’t seek acknowledgements of receipt or retransmit lost packets etc. The result is that UDP is a lighter protocol and therefore far preferred for constrained IoT. There are further implications for the associated messaging protocols: MQTT and CoAP. Both were designed to make efficient use of network resources, but CoAP is inherently more appropriate for constrained environments, being based on UDP. MQTT is more secure and provides more of a guarantee on delivery, but it is chattier.</p><p>Also closely related to protocol selection is security. The aforementioned CoAP/UDP has a more limited set of security capabilities than TCP-based deployments. It’s not inherently insecure though. Most IoT security issues relate to the hardware or the application rather than the networking. Nevertheless it’s a little less secure.</p><p>This creates challenges for delivering to the cloud, and particularly drives a need for ‘cloud connectors’. AWS and Microsoft Azure will not accept DTLS-based security (i.e. the kind of security supported by UDP). This means constrained IoT devices, i.e. the majority of IoT devices, need some kind of proxying and protocol conversion for them to be delivered to the cloud. The solution is a cloud connector, where data is delivered to a network element, which handles protocol conversion and encryption to then deliver to the cloud. A number of communications service providers such as EMnify, Telefonica and Verizon have this functionality. Ericsson also has it as part of its IoT Accelerator.</p><p>There are several other areas where there are further implications, including device management (which I’ll talk about in a few weeks in the context of Lightweight M2M) and edge computing. But they’ll have to wait. </p><p>I will, however, mention one final element – probably the most critical – the application. Here there is an overwhelming need to adapt the application to suit the constraints in which it is being deployed. Highly ‘chatty’ applications will cause havoc for low power devices, or where the devices can only send a few messages a day. </p><p>The overarching trend, and one that we come back to again and again is that there is an increasing requirement for the constituent elements of the application to be optimised with each other. That includes hardware, connectivity, protocols, device management, data processing, networking and the actual application itself. Many technology vendors increasingly get that. Take, for instance, the offering from Wirepas, which optimises across connectivity and hardware, or like Deutsche Telekom IoT’s IoT Solution Optimizer, or the recent announcement from Eseye for its Infinity solution, which includes a connectivity optimisation capability, or the recent announcement of Semtech’s acquisition of Sierra Wireless. More on this in a bit.</p><p>Top priority for anyone building an IoT application is to ensure that all these elements are optimised to work with each other. Easier said than done, of course, but there is a clear future path towards much greater requirement for the supply of these aspects to be done in a coordinated way. If you want to know more about this, check out the article where I go into a bit more detail on a few areas.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Hot M&A news</h1><p>I mentioned it earlier, but the big news of the last few weeks was that Semtech acquired Sierra Wireless and Telit merged with Thales’ IoT hardware business. </p><p>On Friday 29th July Telit and Thales announced that they were combining the assets of Telit with those of Thales’ IoT hardware business into Telit Cinterion. That was followed on 2nd August by the news that Semtech Corporation would acquire Sierra Wireless.</p><p>These announcements affect all three of the triumvirate of cellular IoT hardware makers that dominated the global market as little as a decade ago. Going back ten years, collectively Cinterion, Sierra Wireless and Telit accounted for the majority of IoT shipments. However, since then competition has bitten and they now find themselves as minority players.</p><p>The requirement to gain scale in the face of (particularly Chinese) competitors goes a long way to explain why each would want to find greater scale. But the two deals demonstrate a rather different approach. Telit Cinterion is a straightforward merging of like companies. The Semtech/Sierra Wireless deal has more complexity, given Semtech’s position as the leading player in the LoRaWAN ecosystem.</p><p>We believe that the Semtech/Sierra Wireless acquisition will have by far the greater impact. It creates a vendor with a broad and complementary set of capabilities, whereas Telit Cinterion is simply a scale game, albeit important for the future of Telit. However, to really benefit from the combined assets, Semtech will need to find ways to cross-optimise the various IoT solutions elements that it provides, rather than simply act as a one-stop-shop.</p><p>On the subject of recent acquisitions, actually not that recent. But back in April, to end a long running saga, including a bidding process, Sigfox was acquired by one of its Sigfox Network Operators, UnaBiz, which operates in Taiwan and Singapore. Then as of July this year, Unabiz announced that Sigfox will continue as a technology (what it was best at) and not as a company (well, the least said about that the better). I still think there's room in the market for this kind of very low bandwidth, very high latency tech. There's plenty of use cases that will be fine with that. Assuming it can be delivered at an appropriate price point (which was also a big issue for Sigfox). That and the fact that LoRaWAN has been pushing on in recent years.</p><p>And last but not least, on the 16th August it emerged that Google Cloud IoT Core is being retired on August 16, 2023. It’s what I’ve described as the most Google of moves. This is exactly what I was talking about in my ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/does-google-cloud-have-a-trust-issue">Does Google Cloud have a trust issue</a>’ blog post 18 months ago. and also on <a href="https://www.wirelessnoodle.com/2021/02/wireless-noodle-episode-18-googles.html">episode 18</a> of this podcast. How can you trust a company that just retires products that become inconvenient to run?</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">eSIM and iSIM</h1><p>Finally, I wanted to talk about eSIM and iSIM. It’s something I’ve talked about a bit a few times on the podcast. Over the years the SIM card itself has shrunk in size and eventually become a piece of embedded hardware, in the form of the eSIM in 2016. And since then has then the integrated SIM (or iSIM) arrived in 2018 seeing the SIM functionality become software-based and implemented in a system-on-a-chip hardware.</p><p>The embedded SIM provides a number of benefits in terms of being able to build IoT devices that are smaller, more robust and more secure. However, the biggest implication comes from the fact that the SIM card is not removable. As a result, it was necessary to develop the capability to change the SIM profile through a mechanism other than physically swapping out SIM cards. That mechanism is remote SIM provisioning (RSP). This could be considered another additional benefit of embedded SIM (along with security, size and ruggedness) but it is not an exclusive feature of embedded SIMs. Remote management is a feature that could also be applied to removable form factors too. </p><p>RSP was specified by the GSM Association in 2014, initially for ‘machine-to-machine’ (M2M) devices, and then in 2016 for consumer devices. It consists predominantly of the management of IMSIs (International Mobile Subscriber Identities) on the device, i.e. adding, selecting or deleting IMSIs as appropriate to connect to the correct network. I won’t go into the specifics of how the RSP provisioning works other than to note that the ‘Consumer’ pull variant worked a lot better than the ‘M2M’ push variant, but the lessons have been learned and there’s a sort of hybrid ‘IoT’ version is imminent. So some of the bumps have been ironed out.</p><p>This has a bunch of commercial implications. Regulatory compliance is a lot easier as you can avoid being clobbered for permanent roaming infringements. Supply chains are more efficient because there’s no need to ship a SIM. It offers insurance against network switch off. And theoretically it allows the customer more ability to negotiate with connectivity providers. I say theoretically because really almost no-one has used it in anger. Today it’s used as a way to localise connectivity, and as an insurance policy. That’s how we see it. And that’s backed up by the fact that a lot of the providers of these services (i.e. mostly the old SIM vendors) seem to be pivoting to selling based on a flat fee licence rather than per switch that they were previously anticipating. </p><p>We’re certainly not down on eSIM though. It can drive out a lot of cost in the lifetime of the device due to compliance, supply chain efficiency, lower power and other factors. Check out the white paper we wrote with Quectel for more details: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/white-paper-esim-isim-cost-saving">New study shows 8-13% saving on lifetime connectivity spend from using eSIM/iSIM in IoT</a> . </p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Next week</h1><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>What else do we have for you today? One request and one plug. The request relates to 2G and 3G switch-off as mentioned a couple of episodes ago. The request is to hear from anyone who has been through a 2G (or 3G) switch off process themselves. We want to hear about experiences from real world customers. So if you know of anyone who has been through one or you are someone who has, I’d love to speak with you. Can be completely anonymous and we’re happy to share results of the findings of the research.</p><p>And another plug – we have a stack of webinars coming up. We announced our <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/webinar-series-22-23">2022/23 series of webinars</a> a few months ago. They’re coming up on the 26th September, looking at 5G and mobile private networks (aka private wireless). In November we’re looking at how Digital Transformation will save the planet. That’s all tied up with the Clean Dozen work I spoke about earlier. In January we’ll provide a summary of the work from our annual CSP IoT Peer Benchmarking Report, which is due out in Q4. In March we’ll delve into the opportunity associated with applied AI, and in May next year we’ll share our IoT forecasts.</p><p>Next week I’ll be talking about the fun task of forecasting the AI market, a bit about a new network technology 5G RedCap, and we’ll take a walk through smart metering of all stripes, electricity, gas and water.</p><p>I hope you can join me.</p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-29668679327737579882022-08-23T08:22:00.003+01:002022-09-01T12:01:13.926+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 27: To spin or not to spin?<p>This week's episode examines whether it makes sense for communications service providers to spin out their IoT business units, a look at benchmarking of digital transformation service providers, and a little more on our recent work on sustainability.</p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/to_spin_or_not_to_spin/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below:</p><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. On the agenda today is whether it makes sense for communications service providers to spin out their IoT business units, a look at benchmarking of digital transformation service providers, and a little more on our recent work on sustainability.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Should CSPs spin out their IoT units?</h1><p>In recent weeks there has been some speculation that Vodafone is planning to spin out its IoT business. This is a recurring issue for Communications Service Providers: to what extent should your IoT business unit be independent from the main parent company? In a <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/autonomy-csp-iot-unit">recent report</a> we examined the approach of various operators to devolution and the extent to which there is an optimum level of independence.</p><p>Over the last decade or so we have seen a plethora of different approaches to the degree of independence afforded to a CSP’s IoT business unit. Back in the dim and distant past, there was effectively no such thing as a separate BU, and IoT (back then thought of as ‘machine-to-machine’) was generally a wholesale business supporting MVNOs or involved the sale of undifferentiated SIM cards using regular data tariffs. As such there was no IoT (or M2M) business unit, let alone an independent one. </p><p>Over the course of the last 15 years, as CSPs became more focused on the IoT opportunity they have collectively built up dedicated IoT capabilities across sales, propositions, marketing and engineering separate from that of the main company. In some cases, CSPs have gone even further, establishing business units with separate P&L, and even independent legal entities.</p><p>There are a range of approaches, with varying degrees of independence of those various elements, all laid out in the report. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKuRolewMIkSQ9cIB-ztWCRigyF3vLXGJaGQU-8F8Xky3I56dvn2L49GIQIgvJ0OPjOwlbCN2iMQGxyJE01q7cnYhskQ04uj8WNTpneJl1kUjDioYIk9wtrZciXHwZ3Ayc6-4_DzOZ-NiVWN05ZYAS3wP5qLH7dcnv2RnOpBds6e8R1QlK9R2nXbC1Xg/s2547/CSP%20IoT%20strategies.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1131" data-original-width="2547" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKuRolewMIkSQ9cIB-ztWCRigyF3vLXGJaGQU-8F8Xky3I56dvn2L49GIQIgvJ0OPjOwlbCN2iMQGxyJE01q7cnYhskQ04uj8WNTpneJl1kUjDioYIk9wtrZciXHwZ3Ayc6-4_DzOZ-NiVWN05ZYAS3wP5qLH7dcnv2RnOpBds6e8R1QlK9R2nXbC1Xg/w400-h178/CSP%20IoT%20strategies.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Typically, CSPs have evolved their IoT BUs to be increasingly independent, up to a point. The benefits associated with the first steps of independence were clear, with an evident need for dedicated sales, propositions, marketing and engineering functions. This is generally a one-way street of growing sophistication of the offering, adding value and being better able to directly address the growing opportunity. All of the major CSPs went through a process of establishing some form of IoT business unit covering these areas. <p></p><p>Beyond the establishment of a business unit, the benefits of financial independence and/or legal separation are moot. These elements of devolution of responsibility from the main business to the IoT business unit (or similar) have so far come with diminishing returns in terms of clear demonstrable benefit. This is best illustrated by the fact that CSPs often change direction on the subsidiarity of these higher-level functions. Whereas there are very few examples of CSPs moving responsibility for the basic technical and commercial functions back into the main business, there are several examples where CSPs have changed strategies about higher level independence. We give a few examples in the report.</p><p>One relatively new development has seen some CSPs combine their IoT units with other emerging lines of business such as data analytics, as is the case with Telefonica Tech and Telia Division X. It is too early to say whether these types of initiatives will be more successful, but we believe given the interconnectedness of IoT with other areas such as analytics, AI and edge, that they will offer some benefit. </p><p>Full independence is fraught with challenges, not least the abandonment of a strong competitive differentiator in the ownership of the network and channels to market. We cycle through the potential advantages and disadvantages in the report. The conclusion is that the ability to be independent of the network or technology agnostic, really doesn’t deliver much of a benefit. </p><p>Part of the problem stems from the prevailing survivorship bias in IoT. Everyone looks at the great success of the IoT unicorns and wants to emulate them. But, to be a unicorn you generally have to be able to fail. 90%+ do fail. Network operators have a built in barrier to entry (i.e. the cost of deploying a network) which means their competitive environment is not as harsh (it may not seem it though). They have a guaranteed position in the value chain and it’s not too wise to give it up.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Which vendor is best in digital transformation?</h1><p>In 2021, at Transforma Insights we have undertaken some extensive research looking at the capabilities of dozens of technology vendors in supporting enterprise digital transformation. This has included digging into the capabilities of hyperscalers, consultancies, systems integrators, IT services vendors and industrial technology vendors including AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Accenture, CGI, Siemens, PTC and many many more. </p><p>We assessed their capabilities across 11 key technology areas including AI, IoT, Product Lifecycle Management, Distributed Ledger and Edge Computing, examining hardware, software, consulting, application development and numerous other functions.</p><p>We did this as three tranches, all of which have associated reports. The first looked at Hyperscalers (I talked about this in episode 20). The second was a set of consultancies and technology vendors including Accenture, Deloitte, Fujitsu, IBM, Oracle and TCS. The third tranche was a set of what we termed ‘Industry 4.0 Digital Transformation Service Providers’ including Siemens, PTC, Rockwell Automation, GE and Bosch. </p><p>Based on our assessment, the overall top scoring vendors in the space (with % scores compared to that hypothetical perfect vendor) are Microsoft and Siemens, tied on 52%, followed by IBM on 49%, AWS on 43% and Accenture on 36%. PTC (35%), Rockwell (33%), and TCS (32%) were the only other vendors to break the 30% barrier.</p><p>We have highly granular analysis of all the various product and service elements and we thought it was worth examining how they compare when considering those aspects separately. After all, some companies are better at building product and others are better at implementation. </p><p>The hyperscalers (Microsoft and AWS) and the industrial-focused vendors (Siemens, PTC, Rockwell and Bosch) all score strongly on the products axis. The consultancies/SIs (e.g. Accenture, TCS and Deloitte) all score much better on the services axis. No particular surprises there given the relative focus of each of these types of vendors. IBM is the best at spanning the two.</p><p>If you want to take a look at the blended results, they’re shown a blog post we published earlier this year. I’ll put a link on the wirelessnoodle.com website: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/leading-vendors-digital-transformation">Who are the leading vendors in Digital Transformation?</a>.</p><p>The key thing to be aware of when considering which vendors to use for which projects is that all requirements are different. While the chart presents the overall capabilities as they stand currently, for many projects enterprises will want to use a specialist player focused on a particular part of the market such as Ansys or Dassault Systemes for Product Lifecycle Management. In our reports we dig in sufficient depth to be able to identify the best vendors for specific technology areas and for particular functions, e.g. hardware or systems integration. Each enterprise deployment is different and needs to dig into the granular analysis that is included in the reports.</p><p>It's also worth noting that the market moves fast. The hyperscalers particularly, and AWS more than the others, are rapidly evolving their offerings to challenge established players in many of the technology areas that we cover.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Saving the planet AND making money</h1><p>Finally today, a last look at some of the work we did recently on sustainability, and how enterprises can use disruptive tech to meet their sustainability goals. </p><p>Press release link to the research is provided on the wirelessnoodle.com website: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/clean-dozen-dx-initiatives">New report from Transforma Insights identifies the ‘Clean Dozen’ digital transformation initiatives that will drive sustainability</a>. </p><p>Whilst the main aim of the report is to profile the potential sustainability benefits associated with digitally transformative solutions, it also seeks to provide insight into their business impact. Any associated benefits in terms of improved business performance or bottom-line profits of the company will help to justify the adoption of an application that has an associated sustainability benefit. Typically, reducing the wastage of resources directly reduces the cost of operations which can result in quite significant savings in some industries. </p><p>For example, fuel costs are significant in fleet operations and electricity costs are significant in buildings and these costs can be substantially reduced through the implementation of fleet management and smart buildings solutions, respectively. DX solutions can also promote sustainability by reducing various types of losses and so decreasing the resource consumed per unit of output. For example, by increasing the yield of output in agriculture, the sustainability impact (and cost) per unit of output is lowered.</p><p>In the last few weeks I’ve talked about how the various solutions can reduce energy consumption, but it also worth highlighting how they can save costs.</p><p>Fleet management, for instance, can reduce cost by 10% and increase profitability by up to 30%. Road accidents also fall, typically by 40-50%, and speeding incidents can fall by up to 90%. </p><p>Supply chain solutions can, according to our research, reduce shipping costs by up to 30% and inventory holding costs by up to 50%, as well as providing superior service and reducing incidents of theft.</p><p>Remote Monitoring solutions can increase uptime by 10-15%, reduce maintenance costs (through predictive maintenance) by up to 30% and speed time-to-market by up to 25%. </p><p>Saving the planet is great. But if it also helps to make an organisation more profitable, all the better!</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Next week</h1><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>And another plug – we have a stack of webinars coming up. We announced our 2022/23 series of webinars a few months ago. They’re coming up on the 26th September, looking at 5G and mobile private networks (aka private wireless). In November we’re looking at how Digital Transformation will save the planet. That’s all tied up with the Clean Dozen work I spoke about earlier. In January we’ll provide a summary of the work from our annual CSP IoT Peer Benchmarking Report, which is due out in Q4. In March we’ll delve into the opportunity associated with applied AI, and in May next year we’ll share our IoT forecasts.</p><p>Next week I’ll be talking about constrained IoT and the implications for how deployments are done. Also a bit about Sigfox and eSIM.</p><div><br /></div>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-34183549664320925072022-08-16T08:04:00.001+01:002022-08-16T08:04:05.084+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 26: IoT isn't all about the data<p>In this week's episode, Matt discusses several reasons why it's a fallacy that IoT is "all about the data". He also looks further at the recent Transforma Insights work done on sustainability, with a particular focus on water consumption (very timely!), as well as some thoughts on how the metaverse might be used by enterprise.</p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/episode-26-iot-isn-t-all-about-the-data/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below:</p><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. This week I want to continue the theme of sustainability that I’ve spoken about in the last couple of episodes. This time with a look at reducing water consumption. But ahead of that I want to share some thoughts I had recently about how IoT is not (as many say) all about the data. And I want to share a few thoughts on the metaverse and its use for enterprise.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">IoT is not "all about the data"</h1><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiz6G5bn0MH0binLh941SscjgdU7mOjEO01a9w_p0_STVnLdmPsuZJy8XRBu4jVFzPVgZRuHbCXwpD_BcV_MiY6SSUFkBamFBuN4uJiqaf_9JMgKFw_gy27qtJK2bThSWgBQqhPht43Ov9B-NohzmLFz7yk75H7BbEytrKbCZmwWfFgu88Agr1bCz29Q/s1280/pexels-lukas-590022%20(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="478" data-original-width="1280" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiz6G5bn0MH0binLh941SscjgdU7mOjEO01a9w_p0_STVnLdmPsuZJy8XRBu4jVFzPVgZRuHbCXwpD_BcV_MiY6SSUFkBamFBuN4uJiqaf_9JMgKFw_gy27qtJK2bThSWgBQqhPht43Ov9B-NohzmLFz7yk75H7BbEytrKbCZmwWfFgu88Agr1bCz29Q/w400-h150/pexels-lukas-590022%20(2).jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>We industry analysts are probably more exposed than most to cliches surrounding technology. Things like “people buy solutions not technology”, “<a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/dx-vendors-transformation">digital transformation is not about technology it’s about people and processes</a>” or “<a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/think-big-start-small-move-fast">think big, start small, move fast</a>” . So far, so banal, but mostly harmless. There is, however, one which is actually actively unhelpful: “IoT is all about the data”. Here’s some good reasons why that’s not the case, and thinking that it is might be bad for your project.</p><p>The main role of most IoT devices is to be a trigger, sending alerts that are of the most basic kind, for instance if a manhole cover is moved or the temperature of a refrigerated container rises above a particular level, or a baby monitor is activated. Of course, this is data, even the binary alarm trigger. But it’s not data in the meaning of something that can be stored and analysed. It’s here-today-gone-tomorrow (or more accurately here-now-gone-in-seconds) stimulus for other things. </p><p>In quite a few cases it doesn’t even really generate much data of its own, being used as a mechanism for controlling a device. Connected traffic lights for instance don’t gather much data. They are more there to control the flow of traffic. Basic electronic shelf labels are another great example. There are also instances where further processing of data wouldn’t be appropriate or desirable, for instance in the case of child trackers.</p><p>Actually the way to think of this is not necessarily even as the trigger for an alarm, it’s as the initiator for some kind of business process change or outcome. </p><p>In plenty of IoT use cases there will also be the opportunity to gain some benefit from exhaust data, for instance a washing machine manufacturer adapting its design to reflect usage patterns, or a car manufacturer trading aggregated vehicle position information on a data exchange. The clue here, however, is in the fact that this is exhaust data. It’s a corollary to the main reason for deploying the devices, i.e. to do something.</p><p>Another big category of IoT devices involves consumer media consumption. That might be connected car in-vehicle infotainment, media players, connected TVs, connected cameras and much more besides. In the same way that shelf labels or traffic lights are recipients of largely one-way traffic, so too are media devices. Sure, someone somewhere is probably tracking the media consumption of a particular user, but that is an extremely marginal element of the utility associated with, for instance, a connected TV. These devices account for around 30% of all IoT devices, and certainly a far larger proportion of ‘data’. But this isn’t data that’s there to be analysed. </p><p>Based on a segmentation of IoT use cases in Transforma Insights’ <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/tam/market">IoT Forecast Database</a>, we estimate that less than half (46%) of IoT devices really generate data that is worth analysing. The remainder is either not really generating data that can or should be analysed (15%) or deals with the consumption of media (39%). The proportion creating analysable data will creep up over our forecast period to 51%. </p><p>And it’s worth bearing in mind that the half of IoT devices producing data that can be analysed isn’t necessarily going to deliver a huge amount of value through being analysed. Take the cases of applications like smart watches, home weather stations, printers, ATMs, card payment terminals, assisted living solutions, bike sharing schemes, industrial monitoring or any number of other applications. They all produce analysable data, but it’s a moot point how valuable it will actually be to do so. It’s also questionable how valuable the data is for analytics, given that there may well be substitutable data that can also be used for the same purpose. To be truly valuable, IoT data needs to be unique, and often it isn’t. For the most part their value is also ostensibly in the main use case, not in some nebulous data analytics layered onto them. </p><p>The increasing prevalence of AI and edge computing, means that much data will not make it out of the device at all, meaning no potential for exhaust-data analysis off-device. In an effort to speed up processing time, many IoT deployments will increasingly rely on AI (and other data processing) performed on the device itself with minimal requirement for delivering large volumes of data back to a server. This also, of course, helps keep down the cost of connectivity where a device relies on a public network to connect, e.g. a mobile network. </p><p>With the advent of edge computing and AI, IoT devices are increasingly becoming closed-loop systems where the device receives input from sensors, processes information based on certain rules (potentially using machine learning) and acts accordingly. In most perfectly functioning IoT systems there will be very little ‘data’. </p><p>Why would it be a problem for organisations to believe that the value of IoT lies overwhelmingly in the data? The main issue is that it will potentially hold back deployment. The implication is that success in IoT depends on actively doing something with data, in terms of ingestion, storage, management and monetisation. This can be quite intimidating and may well delay deployments.</p><p>The obsession with data may also result in adopters making wrong choices about technologies. If you believe that all the value of IoT is in the data you would tend to opt for delivering all data from your IoT device back into the cloud (or similar). This is inefficient in many ways. It’s costly in data traffic and storage charges and leads to much higher latency in applications, meaning probably a lower performance. </p><p>It also encourages the adoption of sub-optimal technologies. We have previously discussed the benefits of ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/five-ps-constrain-iot-thin-iot-stack">Thin IoT</a>’, variously networking technologies, protocols, operating systems and so forth that are aimed at optimally supporting IoT deployments in constrained environments. These tend to be cheap and effective ways of connecting IoT devices. But seeking to process and/or transport much larger volumes of data means a different choice of technologies, overwhelmingly more expensive ones. It also generates more data to be processed and stored (and backed-up) ‘in the cloud’, which is not good from a sustainability perspective.</p><p>In most IoT use cases, the majority of the value derives from the mere act of connecting the thing. Doing that cheaply and efficiently has a much better ROI than trying to find mechanisms for monetising large volumes of data that can only be harvested using technologies that push up the price of the deployment. </p><h1 style="text-align: left;">The uses of metaverse for industry</h1><p>Back in April, we at Transforma Insights published our first stab and identifying the impact of the metaverse on enterprises (blog post here: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/metaverse-opportunity-enterprise">The metaverse: an opportunity for enterprises?</a>). The last two years have seen significant activities in the virtual space known as the ‘metaverse’. For instance, Facebook changed its name to Meta, and Microsoft and Nvidia partnered with multiple enterprises for metaverse applications. Meanwhile, JP Morgan, Gucci, and Nike purchased a space in Decentraland to sell their products virtually. Driven by Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence technologies supported with high bandwidth and low latency networks metaverse is likely to be an extension of AR/VR with significant potential for enterprise applications and benefits in future.</p><p>In the report we examined the development stages of the metaverse as an element of Web 3.0 and increasing investments in the space. The report defines enterprise use-cases for metaverse and its corresponding benefits across multiple dimensions (internal vs external, people vs process, multiple interactions, real-time vs hypothetical vs historic process). It further explores in detail examples on how metaverse might be applied across various industry verticals and recommends ways in which enterprises can benefit from the emerging concept.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin_LBOPrQauf71gBwUQ8gb5QIdn3pAAnEV7fb8gcK47Sg5fYHpCqaNfB4p1Pr9gmNlQRdUsFz8gi4f-27Z23TFdYQUVMwisQb3kY8pVBTR0PfJDgQKtBNhLqZ-1F3Gl3xu6-mkzziwix-VW8nDzfr22oGjKTu1gY7qyRghAmG2JKWOiar7z9pGw033hw/s2643/Dimensions-Metaverse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2643" data-original-width="2307" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin_LBOPrQauf71gBwUQ8gb5QIdn3pAAnEV7fb8gcK47Sg5fYHpCqaNfB4p1Pr9gmNlQRdUsFz8gi4f-27Z23TFdYQUVMwisQb3kY8pVBTR0PfJDgQKtBNhLqZ-1F3Gl3xu6-mkzziwix-VW8nDzfr22oGjKTu1gY7qyRghAmG2JKWOiar7z9pGw033hw/s320/Dimensions-Metaverse.jpg" width="279" /></a></div><p>Metaverse, a still nascent cluster of technologies, is set to make its presence felt across multiple industry verticals serving different dimensions. It can be used for person-to-person communication, either for internal interaction within the organisation, between people, for broadcast communication or for multi-party interaction. The popular enterprise applications/use-cases of metaverse includes launch of new collaboration tools, customer interaction, operational virtualisation and mixed reality. Furthermore, it can be used for interaction with processes and systems, as an extension of the digital twin concept.</p><p>Metaverse has a number of horizontal use cases that are applicable across most verticals, including customer care and collaboration. There are also numerous use cases specific to verticals, for instance in manufacturing (for the purpose of simulating production facility, autonomous vehicles, robotic applications and quality assurance), mining (to provide real-time information on mining operations, substitute for workers in harsh environment and remote driving of large mining equipment), retail (virtual retail outlets, product demonstrations and immersive branding experience), transportation (intelligent transportation, in-vehicle VR, entertainment systems and AR-based solution for warehouse workers) and the finance and insurance vertical (virtual customer care and sales, NFTs and crypto-currency). </p><h1 style="text-align: left;">IoT's role in reducing water consumption</h1><p>Finally, another little extract from our report on how enterprises can use disruptive techs, particularly IoT, to meet their sustainability goals. Specifically in this instance we’re looking at water savings. Something that everyone is focusing on a bit recently, with high temperatures around the world.</p><p>The most significant impact on water consumption is through Agriculture, Smart Grid (mainly smart water meters) and Smart Buildings solutions. </p><p>Agriculture solutions include crop management solutions and drones to monitor the humidity and temperature of soil and identify the correct level of water required to maintain crops. On average, Irrigation Management and Soil Monitoring reduces water consumption by 25-30%.</p><p>Soil probes can also provide information on which sections of a field need more or less water, allowing farmers to automate, control and schedule irrigation timing and duration accordingly. On average, these solutions can reduce water consumption by 15-30%, but some organisations have experienced water saving benefits as high as 70-75%. Considering that agriculture is often the largest consumer of freshwater reserves in a country and 50% of water used in irrigation is wasted, these savings can have a significant impact on a country’s overall water sustainability. For instance, an avocado farmer in California saved 75% in water usage and cost by monitoring soil condition. In Chile too, implementation of remote sensors in fields has reduced the volume of water used by 70%. In addition to the above, integrating sensors in water tanks to monitor levels remotely and taking appropriate action can reduce water overflowing cases.</p><p>Smart water meter solutions decrease water consumption by enabling changed consumer behaviour resulting from frequent monitoring and increased awareness. On average, smart water (residential and commercials) meters can reduce water usage by 6-9%.</p><p>Turning to Smart Buildings, here we see around 10% of reduction in water consumption by installing water flow monitoring devices.</p><p>Other areas where we see savings include those related to reducing vehicle usage and therefore less car washing. It might seem like a marginal use case but the Volvo mobility car service survey reported 3.8 million litres of water savings due to fewer car washes in Stockholm in one year. Also Drone solutions with soil sensing technologies can reduce water consumption by 15-20%.</p><p>As ever, a link to <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/clean-dozen-dx-initiatives">the report</a> is provided on the wirelessnoodle.com website, as well as a link to getting hold of a <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/sustainability-digital-transformation-smart-buildings">sample of the report, specifically focused on smart buildings</a>. </p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Next week (and a few requests)</h1><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>A quick plug now for the events we’ll be at in the next few months.</p><p>If you’ll be at Industry of Things World in Berlin, IoT Tech Expo in Amsterdam, the Things Conference in Amsterdam, Mobile World Congress Las Vegas, or IoT Tech Expo in Santa Clara, let me know. All in September/October.</p><p>Link to our events page, where we’ll be speaking, is posted on the wirelessnoodle.com page: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/events ">Transforma Insights events</a>. </p><p>And another request that I mentioned a few weeks ago. The request relates to 2G and 3G switch-off as mentioned a couple of episodes ago. The request is to hear from anyone who has been through a 2G (or 3G) switch off process themselves. We want to hear about experiences from real world customers. So if you know of anyone who has been through one or you are someone who has, I’d love to speak with you. Can be completely anonymous and we’re happy to share results of the findings of the research.</p><p>Next week I’ll be talking a bit about work we did on benchmarking the capabilities of different service providers in the digital transformation space. You may recall that we did this for the cloud hyperscalers a while back and we extended it over the course of the last year to include consultancies and industrial-focused organisations. And I’ll talk a bit about whether communications service providers ought to spin out their IoT business units.</p><p>I hope you can join me. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-66186714307581865202022-08-09T08:58:00.003+01:002022-08-09T08:58:24.143+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 25: Hyperscale IoT connectivity, and LEO satellites<p>In this week's episode, Matt discusses the requirement for Communications Service Providers to pivot to being hyperscale IoT connectivity providers and how best to do it, plus our assessment of the prospects for LEO satellites to deliver IoT and more on the work we did recently on using IoT and other disruptive technologies to tackle sustainability. </p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/hyperscale-iot-connectivity-leo/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below:</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Hyperscale IoT Connectivity</h1><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuOp746gzp2XUZTVxJbuctRGNkOcDHfVEZTZ6umTeIyXPnkPsSIv9Q9yAcd63QmROwhVJfk3IYjN5KEIRRZwMqUApT2J2by4a7n6hrkuXjSh8vQ8N1kP1x_vPS-4ofOsT1zPtSlRi2GKYjk6oZ6JoYfk5LoRgzkEem4togHKbIrFGgb3GJ1g26oqWOiQ/s951/CSP_benchmarking_hyperscale_2021.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="658" data-original-width="951" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuOp746gzp2XUZTVxJbuctRGNkOcDHfVEZTZ6umTeIyXPnkPsSIv9Q9yAcd63QmROwhVJfk3IYjN5KEIRRZwMqUApT2J2by4a7n6hrkuXjSh8vQ8N1kP1x_vPS-4ofOsT1zPtSlRi2GKYjk6oZ6JoYfk5LoRgzkEem4togHKbIrFGgb3GJ1g26oqWOiQ/w400-h276/CSP_benchmarking_hyperscale_2021.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. What have we got for you this week? I’ll be talking a bit about more about the work we’ve done on the ‘Clean Dozen’ solution areas that will help enterprises meet their sustainability goals. Also something on low earth orbit satellites and their impact on IoT (or maybe lack of it), and a look at the work we did on Communications Service Providers in IoT last year, and why they need to be hyperscale IoT connectivity providers.</p><p>First up, let’s talk CSP IoT Peer Benchmarking. This is probably our (and certainly my) number 1 piece of research during the year. We analyse the relative strengths of 12 leading providers of global IoT connectivity in areas such as networks, platforms, vertical solutions and commercial strategy.</p><p>Link to the press release: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/transforma-insights-csp-iot-benchmarking ">New Transforma Insights study ranks the leading global IoT Communications Service Providers</a> </p><p>The market for cellular IoT connectivity has become increasingly complex and competitive recently. In these circumstances, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) have to take a long hard look at their strategies and approaches to the market. There are effectively two options: find additional revenue streams or put in place systems and processes to cope with the pressures. </p><p>The report focuses on the core role of the CSP, i.e. the provision of connectivity. To succeed in that, CSPs need to evolve to become a ‘Hyperscale IoT Connectivity Providers’. The assessment in the report focuses on whether the CSP has put in place (or is in the process of putting in place) the necessary capabilities to deliver scalable connectivity to support at least ten times the number of devices at low cost points. The report rates each CSP based on their aptitude as Hyperscale IoT Connectivity Providers, across seven key areas (in declining order of importance) as indicated the chart below.</p><p>Efficient connectivity onboarding and management – this is about scalable middleware platforms for connectivity management. DT, Vodafone and Telenor score well here.</p><p>Global connectivity support – This includes issues of size of footprint, consideration of regulatory compliance, ability to do intra-network troubleshooting, local break out, and more. VF, DT, Telenor again score well as does KORE. MVNOs are good at this stuff.</p><p>Cloud integration is a slightly more nebulous topic (pun intended). Here we’re on the subject of cloud connectors, which is the subject of a new Transforma Insights report. Check out the website for more details. It should be published by the time this goes out. Verizon is good here, as is IoT MVNO EMnify (although it’s not featured in the report). The subject of something called IoT SAFE also comes up here, and I’ll share more on that later.</p><p>Business organisation is about running a streamlined and efficient organisation. Many of the CSPs profiled have established separate business units. That’s good. MVNOs are typically very efficient here.</p><p>We can’t ignore having a good roster of hyperscale access technologies. I will talk about constrained IoT in a later podcast. There are techs specifically designed for addressing constrained IoT. LPWA techs, for instance. Decent operators need the full set. </p><p>Scalability is also relevant to core networks. There’s still quite a bit of room to move for CSPs to really take advantage of the ability to spin up virtual core networks in different locations, e.g. for compliant and innovative services. Some CSPs have already deployed virtualised core networks e.g. Aeris and recently AT&T for 5G.</p><p>Finally hardware. There is a massive increasing requirement to cross-optimise IoT connectivity, hardware (and application and cloud). There’s a great <a href="https://www.iot-now.com/2022/07/11/122261-how-the-demands-of-constrained-iot-are-reshaping-the-connectivity-landscape/">article I wrote for IoT Now</a> recently that deals with this. And I’ll talk about it on a later pod.</p><p>Who’s good with hardware. AT&T and Verizon both are. TEF and Orange also good with pre-integrated devices. And KORE is outstanding with its device lifecycle management capability. </p><p>Two big emerging aspect of IOT connectivity are around mobile private networks (aka private wireless) and 5G. We have a webinar coming up on the 26 September where we’ll be sharing our views on both aspects. Link: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/webinar-5g-mpn-september22">Webinar: A marriage made on the campus? Developments in 5G and private networks and how they come together</a>.</p><p>The 2022 version of the CSP Benchmarking report is due in Q4 this year. Keep an eye out.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites for IoT</h1><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNa2HD2dkmTetfIOdzQ6MPjCVcUYlV3wwhn3wJWG9SlDTagcNf943bSsEoWICW2PfI3AfN8HhXgQF7Ka5AdJjTeY3FcRWz61mvunZs0Au0fqyiPgAsbLiAEZkqYFWgfZkO3Fh6RGZO-CYqSBMenUiqDQAslPWAS_dB99rJ7izwfM2VilK8Ybvbc541MQ/s1273/pexels-spacex-60133.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="568" data-original-width="1273" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNa2HD2dkmTetfIOdzQ6MPjCVcUYlV3wwhn3wJWG9SlDTagcNf943bSsEoWICW2PfI3AfN8HhXgQF7Ka5AdJjTeY3FcRWz61mvunZs0Au0fqyiPgAsbLiAEZkqYFWgfZkO3Fh6RGZO-CYqSBMenUiqDQAslPWAS_dB99rJ7izwfM2VilK8Ybvbc541MQ/w640-h286/pexels-spacex-60133.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>Satellite has been used to connect IoT devices for decades. But it has seen a surge of interest in recent years, particularly with the launch of constellations of thousands of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites from the likes of SpaceX and Amazon’s Project Kuiper. There are also dozens of smaller constellations of LEOs aimed at addressing IoT, and in many cases starting to support 5G, NB-IoT, LoRaWAN and other traditionally terrestrial technologies. </p><p>We recently published a couple of reports. The first looked at the various technology elements, helping anyone to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of LEOs vs geostationary satellites (GEOs), which frequency bands are being used, protocols (and their adaptation for satellite), architectures (bent pipe vs store and forward vs crosslink) and end device types (user equipment vs gateway). I don’t plan to go through all of these on the podcast, but here’s an introduction.</p><p>Link to the <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/technology-overview-satellite-iot">satellite technology</a> report and the <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/leo-satellite-iot-vendor-landscape">satellite operator/market report</a> will go on the wirelessnoodle.com website.</p><p>GEO (Geostationary Orbit) – These operate at altitudes of 35,786km in a circular orbit above the equator. They remain in fixed positions, with speeds that match the earth’s rotation. Because of their distance from Earth it is possible to cover most of the surface with just three satellites. Geostationary satellite systems also benefit from not needing more expensive tracking antennas because they never move relative to the antenna. However, they are often inconveniently located for devices at higher or lower latitudes due to the required angle to reach the equator. The other main drawback is the distance from the surface, which increases the latency (in the order of 100-300ms) which means that two-way communications, including some protocols such as TCP/IP that require ‘handshakes’, are not optimal (although there are work-arounds). Major GEO constellations include AsiaSat, Eutelsat, Intelsat and SES.</p><p>LEO (Low Earth Orbit) – Typically operate between 160km and 2,000km. These satellites are not geo-stationary, with an orbit period (i.e. the time to circle the earth) of 84-127 minutes. The lower orbit means you need hundreds to cover the surface of the earth with constant coverage. However, the fact that they are not geostationary means that a small number of satellites can cover large amounts of the earth during a 24-hour period for non-real-time communications. Being close to the earth makes for lower latency communications (~20ms) assuming that there is a satellite overhead when data communications are required and the large number of satellites increases the capacity relative to small numbers of GEO satellites.</p><p>There are also Medium Earth Orbit satellites (MEOs) but let’s skip over them for now.</p><p>LEO satellites are typically significantly smaller and cheaper than GEO satellites; of the order of 100kg-400kg versus 1,500kg-7,000kg for GEOs. The cost for a LEO satellite is typically around USD500,000, compared to USD500 million for a GEO satellite. Launch costs are also comparably higher for GEO. To balance that slightly, clearly multiple LEO satellites are required, LEO satellite constellations are more complex to run, they may require more ground stations (albeit smaller and cheaper) to receive communications, and the user equipment is sometimes more complex – requiring electronically steerable antennas – and expensive. This is because the LEO satellites are moving rather than static.</p><p>Another particularly interesting question at the moment is about protocol choices. There are some satellite-specific protocols. But the interesting thing at the moment related to IoT is the use of (particularly LEOs) for using traditionally terrestrial techs for the data link cellular technologies (NB-IoT, LTE-M and 5G NR), and two low power wide area (LPWA) technologies developed originally for use in license-exempt bands, LoRaWAN and Sigfox.</p><p>Cellular technologies, including 5G, NB-IoT and LTE-M, are standardised by the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP), a body which combines the world’s major standards development organisations for the purposes of defining a common standard for global cellular communications. Its current releases are focused on the evolution of 5G technology. In 2017 3GPP started to examine the potential for integrating satellites into 5G. The latest, Release 17, includes some elements that are particularly interesting for this report, specifically those related to ‘NR over Non Terrestrial Networks (NTN)’ (i.e. regular 5G ‘New Radio’ for communications and broadband access via satellite), and ‘IoT over Non Terrestrial Networks (NTN)’, which is focused predominantly on satellite but also includes the likes of ground-to-air connectivity for in-flight connectivity on planes, as well as high-altitude platforms based on balloons. </p><p>Again, much more in the report on this topics. And on the use of LoRaWAN and possibly Sigfox, as well as delving into architectures and device types. Not enough time on the podcast.</p><p>And we dig into the commercial aspects in a separate report. There is a lot of hype around about the LEO market today. Most of the substantial deployments have focused on the broadband market rather than IoT. Those LEO operators with aspirations to address IoT have been relatively slow to deploy networks. The challenges remain significant. There is no certainty that there will be a sufficiently large market to address to support all of the operators that are aiming to build businesses in satellite communications. Doubtless the additional functionality of the latest generation of LEOs will allow operators to deliver cheaper and better IoT connectivity. However, this is shaping up to be a fiercely contested space, with some operators already making the decision not to launch. And demand is unproven. Existing providers connect a few million IoT devices, but with largely stagnant growth. More competition will likely drive down prices, reducing profitability even if the predicted billions of LEO-connected devices are deployed. We remain sceptical and expect substantial numbers of failures.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Using IoT to reduce fuel and energy consumption</h1><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ_V6PxQHiyKiBMzQ0DhUK5zOc3XOQ-epl-0lxPaS2008T5BhQl-ENeZrtK5cn2GdpQu06RVDTa2jXyciWQVLQ_ZX55VounjkqGZ-ZrX6vwAd4CbNAcKxbFF0i4ElN5Vh4qShn18GcXKennxPMQR7outzQvDtb6La-ZAJDRhfr34swzpiIgoXhCjq--w/s2912/Clean-Dozen-Sustainability-Title-Logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2740" data-original-width="2912" height="376" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ_V6PxQHiyKiBMzQ0DhUK5zOc3XOQ-epl-0lxPaS2008T5BhQl-ENeZrtK5cn2GdpQu06RVDTa2jXyciWQVLQ_ZX55VounjkqGZ-ZrX6vwAd4CbNAcKxbFF0i4ElN5Vh4qShn18GcXKennxPMQR7outzQvDtb6La-ZAJDRhfr34swzpiIgoXhCjq--w/w400-h376/Clean-Dozen-Sustainability-Title-Logo.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>Last week I talked about some work we’ve done on using disruptive technologies for sustainability, i.e. the <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/clean-dozen-dx-initiatives">Clean Dozen</a>. Plenty of mileage to come from digging deeper into that. I want to talk about fuel and electricity consumption, which have a direct impact on an enterprise’s carbon footprint. </p><p>Lots of overlap between energy and fuel consumption. Electricity is often generated from burning hydro-carbon fuels, and equally importantly, the consumption of fuel is predominantly done by motor vehicles, which will, over time, shift to becoming electric vehicles. This will move the consumption of fuel to that of energy. The ESG impact will therefore change. The extent of that change will depend on how the electricity is generated, be it by nuclear power stations, wind turbines or coal-fired power-stations. </p><p>So, which of our clean dozen have the biggest impact on those two? Fleet operations first. The impact on fuel consumption from such systems can be substantial. I mentioned last week that fleet telematics can reduce fuel consumption by 15%, and thus the total cost of running a fleet by 6%. There are also indirect opportunities too. Tyre pressure monitoring can also have a very positive impact, for instance preventing the 8% fuel lost that can result from under-inflated tyres. Higher fuel costs in 2022 will doubtless have focused the attention of many fleet managers on realising these benefits, for economic if not for environmental reasons. </p><p>Another good example of indirect savings comes from Supply Chain, which includes a range of solutions where technologies are applied to improve the workings of a transport, logistics and distribution network. There are some direct factors, for instance container tracking resulting in 2-3% savings on fuel. Indirect savings can be even more substantial. For instance, the average company using an inventory management system can make space savings of 20%, resulting in commensurate savings on electricity. </p><p>Smart Cities includes numerous use cases that can provide substantial benefit for cities, including smart streetlights, road traffic control systems, and parking space monitoring. The implementation of smart street lighting can typically save cities 20% on their electricity costs. According to Transforma Insights analysis, smart lighting can save between 17kg and 34kg of CO2 per street light per year. Meanwhile parking space monitoring such as that implemented by SFpark in San Francisco, can reduce fuel consumption in idling and in searching for parking spaces by up to 40%. And traffic monitoring systems can save on average 2% of fuel for every journey across the city. I already mentioned last week that Smart Public Transport can cut fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by 10-15%. </p><p>Smart Buildings are a critical area. With buildings accounting for 55% of global energy consumption, efficiency savings here can have global impact. The application of IoT could cut energy consumption by as much as 10%, including a 35-40% saving on lighting and 20-25% savings on HVAC. </p><p>Smart Grid, which includes all aspects of grid operations including smart metering and management of transmission and distribution networks, is the other major area where energy savings can have a huge impact. Smart metering reduces consumption by 3-5% for consumers and 10-12% for enterprises. Meanwhile electricity grid operations can typically reduce electricity lost across the distribution network by 7-8%.</p><p>Take a look at the report and associated press release for more details. And there’s a free sample of the Smart Buildings section of the report available to download for free. Link on the wirelessnoodle.com website: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/sustainability-digital-transformation-smart-buildings">Sustainability enabled by Digital Transformation [Sample: Smart Buildings]</a></p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Next week</h1><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>Next week I’ll share how IoT is not all about the data, despite what everyone says. I’ll also dig a bit into the metaverse, and a further look into the sustainability report, particularly focused on water savings. </p><p>I hope you can join me.</p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-38546472973545011342022-08-02T15:26:00.005+01:002022-08-02T15:30:30.141+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 24: The Clean Dozen<p>We're back after a year's hiatus, but with lots of great research to talk about. Matt shares details of the 'Clean Dozen' solution areas that enterprises need to focus on to meet their sustainability objectives as well as looking at some recent news (including how great Transforma Insights is!). </p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/thecleandozen/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below:</p><p>It’s been very nearly a year since the last episode of the podcast. Since then we’ve more or less come out of lockdown and I’ve been able to get on the road. We analysts, particularly when you’re part of a start up, thrive on exposure and it’s been a bit tough not being able to get in front of people. That’s part of the reasons for doing this podcast dear listener. So I personally and professionally have missed being able to get in front of people. But there’s a lot of that coming up soon. If you’ll be at Industry of Things World in Berlin, IoT Tech Expo in Amsterdam, the Things Conference in Amsterdam, Mobile World Congress Las Vegas, or IoT Tech Expo in Santa Clara, let me know. </p><p>And things have been going bananas at Transforma Insights. But things are a little quieter now over the summer. So I have a bit of time to dig into a load of research areas and share with you good people.</p><p>What am I going to be talking about this week? Quick run-down of what’s been in the news just recently, including a fair bit of M&A. But first, we’ll look at some more work we at TI have been doing on how disruptive technologies (mostly IoT) are going to save the world. </p><h1 style="text-align: left;">The 'Clean Dozen'</h1><p>In July 2022 we published a report called ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/clean-dozen-dx-initiatives">Sustainability Enabled by Digital Transformation</a>’, which details the results of its recently completed analysis of the sustainability impact of new and emerging technologies.</p><p>You’ve heard of the Dirty Dozen, well, the conclusion of the comprehensive study is that there is a ‘Clean Dozen’ solution areas that can help organisations achieve sustainability goals, including fleet operations, supply chain, smart grid and smart buildings. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRfof-t1TFnKbJldmlXmlBlrH8Pl0Lu4z4DWYNDf0XCRvmoNI4xi6Syeac6MvRIRo_ZqsfcWlX1nyPLfcGDi0Zzo6aMUeYVHQfuwIKmYbDhiGiBmH-aLslLUM_8UHoLuz3Xlp7hniTLmcQS4CNNfdLwLwqSl5KSphOlazkky8jQ5OzUUeFSxrJmhgDHQ/s2573/The-Clean-Dozen-Movie.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2573" data-original-width="2394" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRfof-t1TFnKbJldmlXmlBlrH8Pl0Lu4z4DWYNDf0XCRvmoNI4xi6Syeac6MvRIRo_ZqsfcWlX1nyPLfcGDi0Zzo6aMUeYVHQfuwIKmYbDhiGiBmH-aLslLUM_8UHoLuz3Xlp7hniTLmcQS4CNNfdLwLwqSl5KSphOlazkky8jQ5OzUUeFSxrJmhgDHQ/w373-h400/The-Clean-Dozen-Movie.jpg" width="373" /></a></div><p>The dozen solution areas account for use cases with significant impact on electricity consumption, (hydrocarbon) fuel consumption, water usage, and CO2 emissions, collectively representing the main measures of sustainability. As well as that, the report also analyses the often-extensive benefits that they can bring to meeting wider ESG goals, as well as the parallel benefits that they might bring in driving a positive business impact.</p><p>While the report draws from analysis of numerous key enabling technologies, including AI, Distributed Ledger, Robotic Process Automation, Product Lifecycle Management and Additive Manufacturing, it is the Internet of Things that is overwhelmingly at the core of applications that enable sustainability benefits, albeit often augmented by other technologies. The IoT represents the interface between all types of IT systems and ‘the real world’, and it is in the real world that savings in energy consumption, water consumption and CO2 emissions can be made. IoT is where the rubber meets the road. </p><p>This is particularly true in the enterprise. IoT solutions deployed by businesses are very often explicitly done to reduce energy usage or in some way make the business more efficient. For consumers it’s often less the case, with many deployed to improve a proposition rather than for cost savings, although there are some. We also consider the whole lifecycle of devices, allowing for the fact that there’s a lot of energy used in the production and distribution of IoT devices.</p><p>As mentioned, overall, we have identified twelve key areas (the ‘Clean Dozen’) where digital transformation can significantly help an organisation achieve sustainability goals. These are discussed in more detail in this document and comprise:</p><p>Fleet Operations, including a range of applications associated with the efficient operation and maintenance of vehicle fleets. The impact on fuel consumption from such systems can be substantial. Fleet telematics can reduce fuel consumption by 15%, and thus the total cost of running a fleet by 6%. There are also indirect opportunities too. </p><p>Supply Chain includes a range of applications used to improve the working and efficiency of supply chain operations such as sourcing, logistics, transportation, warehousing, manufacturing and production. There are some direct factors, for instance container tracking resulting in 2-3% savings on fuel. Indirect savings can be even more substantial. For instance, the average company using an inventory management system can make space savings of 20%, resulting in commensurate savings on electricity. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJxvGg_LtAgFhFYgvJmPaP_SH5kmDocXpY1QGNrhkficP90oU4YelNzjHLcDrDSLitppKVustoeJ2mCh7WLRvxD1enyh5b-706nx_EqTRuuNFDGy0TooRGwvE07NLEt-z81X-ba8JVjRVsZ9Zcc9mYg-e-tg2lxRXkwaesiUUXDvsCGITjuNvGLnHZNQ/s2912/Clean-Dozen-Sustainability-Title-Logo.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2740" data-original-width="2912" height="376" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJxvGg_LtAgFhFYgvJmPaP_SH5kmDocXpY1QGNrhkficP90oU4YelNzjHLcDrDSLitppKVustoeJ2mCh7WLRvxD1enyh5b-706nx_EqTRuuNFDGy0TooRGwvE07NLEt-z81X-ba8JVjRVsZ9Zcc9mYg-e-tg2lxRXkwaesiUUXDvsCGITjuNvGLnHZNQ/w400-h376/Clean-Dozen-Sustainability-Title-Logo.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>Smart Cities comprises of wide spectrum of smart city applications ranging from street lighting control to traffic management and parking space monitoring. The implementation of smart street lighting can typically save cities 20% on their electricity costs. Meanwhile parking space monitoring can reduce fuel consumption in idling and in searching for parking spaces by up to 40%. </p><p>Another municipal service that can have a major sustainability impact is Smart Public Transport, which includes systems for operating public transport more efficiently. Overall Transforma Insights estimates that fuel consumption, and CO2 emissions, can be reduced by 10-15% by such initiatives. </p><p>Smart Buildings is one of the top solution areas, comprising monitoring and control of building systems including lighting, HVAC, windows, blinds, curtains, and doors, based on occupancy levels of areas within a building. The application of IoT could cut energy consumption by as much as 10%. </p><p>Smart Grid, which includes all aspects of grid operations including smart metering and management of transmission and distribution networks, is the other major area where energy savings can have a huge impact. And smaller scale Campus Microgrids are a network of distributed energy resources (DERs) for managing electricity flow in a campus location. All very useful for managing power consumption.</p><p>Remote Monitoring & Maintenance includes a range of applications for remote monitoring and maintaining the condition of machines. This can result in energy savings of around 10%, as well as improved original equipment effectiveness of over 30%, and increased uptime of 10-15%, and numerous other benefits. It’s really about business impact (and who doesn’t love something that’s saving the planet while also saving money) but has a knock on effect in reducing energy consumption.</p><p>Smart Healthcare, solutions used to remotely monitor the health of people. Here, the relevant thing is that hospitals use a lot more energy than other buildings. So if you can reduce the need for people to be in hospital, you can reduce their impact. And healthcare monitoring can reduce admissions by 45-50%, thus reducing the electricity consumption by 20-30%. And, of course, with wider ESG benefits.</p><p>Drone-based Solutions, solutions that enable efficient maintenance and monitoring of infrastructure in buildings, wind farms with drone-based inspection. Saves hugely on jet fuel used for helicopters. And for delivery, for instance, global warming impact per km of travel is 1/6th that of motorcycle delivery, according to a study in South Korea. Plus they’re at least 50% faster at inspections than manual inspections.</p><p>Smart Agriculture includes a range of applications used to make farming methods more efficient while increasing yield. Mostly about water savings, but increasing yield means you reduce electricity consumption per tonne of crop produced. Our calculations say 15-20% increase in yield means 9-12% reduction in electricity used per tonne. But it’s really on water usage that agriculture solutions shine. The average irrigation management system reduces consumption by 25-30%. More on this next week.</p><p>And finally, Efficient Operations, other technology use cases that contribute towards sustainability initiatives but that are not related to IoT. This includes chatbots and RPA, and other forms of low level AI. These types of things make operations more efficient and so on.</p><p>Check out the report. A free sample, on <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/sustainability-digital-transformation-smart-buildings">Smart Buildings</a>, is available on our website. </p><p><br /></p><h1 style="text-align: left;">News</h1><p>What has happened in the 12 months since I’ve been away. Well, there’s no way we can cover all of that in the time we have available. So I’ve picked out just a couple of titbits of info.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Transforma Insights is leading IoT analyst firm</h2><p>First up, a bit of a plug for us at Transforma Insights. I want to tell you about a study from late last year. </p><p>A survey of the IoT community undertaken earlier this month by B2B technology PR firm CCgroup rated analyst firms based on their influence in IoT. Overall Transforma Insights rated sixth in the survey. </p><p>Amongst one of the three identified categories of participants, “OEMs”, Transforma Insights ranked as the number one most influential firm. The OEMs category includes manufacturers of embedded devices which are then sold on to end-user organisations, including car manufacturers and medical equipment manufacturers.</p><p>The report overall highlights the importance of analysts in the decision-making process for vendor selection: 32% of IoT buyers use analyst reports for information about vendors, 43% use industry analysts to identify and shortlist vendors, and 31% state that most purchasing decisions involve industry analysts, a figure which increases to 43% for OEM organisations.</p><p>More details can be found here: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/independent-study-transforma-insights-iot">New independent study rates Transforma Insights as one of the most influential analyst firms for IoT</a>.</p><p>That was the selfish plug. What else? We’ve put out an update on our IoT forecasts. A few highlights of the report:</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">IoT Forecasts</h2><p>At the end of 2021 there were 11.3 billion active IoT devices, a figure which will grow to 29.4 billion in 2030, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12%.</p><p>Short range technologies will dominate connections, accounting for 73% in 2030, a slight reduction compared to the 77% it accounts for today. Public networks, which are dominated by cellular networks, will grow from 1.35 billion connections in 2021 to 5.7 billion in 2030, growing market share from 12% to 19%. Private networks account for the balance of connections.</p><p>In 2030 the consumer sector will account for 58% of all connections. Of the enterprise segment in 2030, 30% of devices will be accounted for by ‘cross-vertical’ use cases such as generic track-and-trace, office equipment and fleet vehicles, 29% by utilities, most prominently smart meters, 20% by retail/wholesale (predominantly payment processing devices), 7% by government, 4% by transport and logistics, and 2% for finance and insurance.</p><p>More details here: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/global-iot-connections-294">Global IoT connections to hit 29.4 billion in 2030</a> </p><h2 style="text-align: left;">IoT M&A</h2><p>In the last few weeks there’s been a lot of M&A. No surprises there, there seems to be pretty regularly. </p><p>Consolidation in the IoT hardware space as Telit acquires Thales cellular IoT modules business (the old Cinterion) as Telit Cinterion. Thales will be a shareholder of the new entity. Interesting the stress on it being a "western" IoT solutions provider. By which they mean "if you can't buy Chinese, buy from us".</p><p>Soracom is working now with Astrocast to provide LEO satellite connectivity. Soracom has a pretty impressive roster of access technologies (cellular, LoRa, Sigfox, and now satellite). Hard to think of anyone who covers all those bases! </p><p>Oh and on the subject of Sigfox, it finally got acquired by Singaporean (and other places) Sigfox Network Operator Unabiz. The technology continues, the company disappears. That’s probably for the best. The tech probably has a niche, the business wasn’t particularly run well. </p><p>Continuing M&A in the MVNO space, such as Wireless Logic acquiring Mobius (which is strong on security), and JT IoT acquired Top Connect, an Estonian company which doesn’t seem to bring much to the table but probably a bit more scale. Also our friends at onomondo raised $21 million. Now there’s an interesting company, particularly in the context of cloud integration of IoT data (more on which in a later podcast).</p><p>But why so much interest in MVNOs. It’s still partly because there’s a lot of money sloshing around out there. Also I think eSIM is helping MVNOs in IoT more than others. More on all these topics later.</p><p>If you’re interested in IoT MVNOs, check out our <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/iot-mvno-market-landscape-2021">IoT MVNO Market Landscape report</a> from November last year. </p><p>What else do we have for you today? One request and one plug. The request relates to 2G and 3G switch-off. As I’ve spoken about previously on the podcast, network operators around the world have been going through a process of switching off (refarming) their 2G and 3G spectrum for use with 4G and 5G. This has meant anyone using 2G networks (less so 3G as it’s not really used for IoT much) has had to switch out their connections. Less of a problem for handsets as you can just get another one. Potentially a big problem for IoT where you’d expect some devices to stick around for a decade or more and it’s a pain to replace them. I spoke about this on episode 6. The request is to hear from anyone who has been through a 2G (or 3G) switch off process themselves. We want to hear about experiences from real world customers. So if you know of anyone who has been through one or you are someone who has, I’d love to speak with you. Can be completely anonymous and we’re happy to share results of the findings of the research.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Digital Transformation webinar series</h1><p>And a plug – we have a stack of webinars coming up. We announced our 2022/23 series of webinars a few months ago. They’re coming up on the 26th September, looking at 5G and mobile private networks (aka private wireless). In November we’re looking at how Digital Transformation will save the planet. That’s all tied up with the Clean Dozen work I spoke about earlier. In January we’ll provide a summary of the work from our annual CSP IoT Peer Benchmarking Report, which is due out in Q4. In March we’ll delve into the opportunity associated with applied AI, and in May next year we’ll share our IoT forecasts.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirYg5m4RyJMGcSPy3qRIlBwVhdcvVHviJKeC1Vb2NGpVmqYwRu81uCxtsnXsO0u6o1O8trR-XiYzaKgjpRze9JAmE9duBIO9FfTig1UWHfRvN5GHbGP_gjIZO9Fasb1rpRWlFwSHCZB-LLmHa4tuaRlpbRMhfp9kCbDbD2ssBMqODa8adht8TZ2RslVA/s1920/transforma-insights-webinar-series-22-23.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirYg5m4RyJMGcSPy3qRIlBwVhdcvVHviJKeC1Vb2NGpVmqYwRu81uCxtsnXsO0u6o1O8trR-XiYzaKgjpRze9JAmE9duBIO9FfTig1UWHfRvN5GHbGP_gjIZO9Fasb1rpRWlFwSHCZB-LLmHa4tuaRlpbRMhfp9kCbDbD2ssBMqODa8adht8TZ2RslVA/w400-h225/transforma-insights-webinar-series-22-23.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>Tune in, they’re free. A link will be provided on the wireless noodle site: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/webinar-series-22-23">Transforma Insights announces 2022/23 webinar series</a>.</p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Next week</h1><p>Next week I’ll have a bit more on the clean dozen, a dive into satellite LEOs and a bit of our research on mobile private networks which will feature in the webinar in September.</p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated.</p><div><br /></div>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-15663137213049964932021-08-11T08:59:00.002+01:002021-08-11T08:59:53.700+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 23: They may be virtual but the change is real<p>Matt dives into the obsessions that IoT companies have with value chains and their position in them, plus a look at the increasingly vibrant IoT MVNO world. And a little bit on Everynet's new US LoRaWAN network. </p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/virtual-change-real/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKNrTnffvdmWeYvrYUKh1awU2SEtkzAZT2VfeJVE6P4sVF1hqH7tB9fJF5g3BEnvSRb1Q7sexIVGqWJ-HmnxKSn_H1sZaPILSIkoke4_v4PqGUodSR-Q759qXGXM7EE0CnVMF8-xNjnZE9/s1280/pexels-joey-kyber-119562.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKNrTnffvdmWeYvrYUKh1awU2SEtkzAZT2VfeJVE6P4sVF1hqH7tB9fJF5g3BEnvSRb1Q7sexIVGqWJ-HmnxKSn_H1sZaPILSIkoke4_v4PqGUodSR-Q759qXGXM7EE0CnVMF8-xNjnZE9/s320/pexels-joey-kyber-119562.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>Tech vendors are excessively obsessed with the concept of the value chain, to the detriment of delivering value to their customers. Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. I’m delving into value chains this week, as well as looking a the IoT MVNO market, which has been vibrant recently, plus a little bit on Everynet’s US LoRaWAN deployment.</p><p><></p><p>IoT companies are (implicitly or explicitly) excessively obsessed with the value chain and their positions within it. It means the focus is always on how the product fits relative to their peers rather than relative to customer needs. </p><p>The first problem with the value chain in IoT is that it’s not a true one. In a true value chain any given element procures product from the segment to its left, adds value, and then sells to the element to its right. That’s not how IoT works. The entry point to the sale to the customer can be almost anywhere along that line. They could buy the different elements separately. Or almost any one of them can pull together a full offering to sell to the customer, for instance a device manufacturer could resell connectivity and support a deployment using its own management platform. The ‘value chain’ is more of a description of the different functions that need to be part of delivering a solution.</p><p>The more important problem with the value chain, however, is less obvious. It is that vendors in the space over-obsess with what they’re selling while ignoring the far more important question of who they are selling it to. The result is products that are built to occupy a position in the value chain rather than built to address as specific set of users. This is quite particular to the Internet of Things. Other technology segments are much better able to focus: Salesforce is aimed at sales people, Github is aimed at developers, Wordpress at website owners with little development expertise, DataRobot at data scientists with no programming skills. All of them understand very well their community. Some will seek to evolve beyond it, adding additional features and functionality, but they critically know their customers.</p><p>This is a reinvention of the age-old problem of the technology sector being supply driven, rather than demand-led. IoT is still supply driven, with the result that hardware and software capabilities are developed to meet a perceived technical ‘gap’ rather than to address the needs of the potential adopters.</p><p>But the organisations that ‘get’ that the focus needs to be on tailoring features, functionality, roadmap, positioning, price etc to the needs of the individual they’re targeting will win. For instance it’s good to see a bunch of vendors focused specifically on the needs of developers (Edge Impulse, Blues Wireless, Pycom being just a few examples that spring to mind). The real secret of the success of the ‘outsiders’ who will eat IoT (Amazon Web Services (AWS) Microsoft, SAP, Twilio Inc. etc.) is in putting together a consistent offering aimed at the needs of the user.</p><p>In a recent <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/vendors-iot-solutions-think-sell-to">Transforma Insights report</a> I dig into examples of organisations that have not been sufficiently focused on the needs of the actual end users. And make some recommendations about how best to do it. </p><p><></p><p>One a related subject. Thinking about nimble organisations that are better at meeting the needs of their customers, I wrote another report the other week looking at IoT MVNOs. 5 years ago I’d have said that part of the market was stagnant, but there’s a new breed (although some are old companies) of MVNOs doing v interesting stuff. And they’re in the news a lot:</p><p>- Wireless Logic acquired Things Mobile in Italy</p><p>- Blues Wireless, backed by Ray Ozzie, secured $22m in funding</p><p>- Giesecke & Devrient, the SIM guys, bought Pod Group</p><p>- FloLIVE secured $15.5m in funding</p><p>- JT IoT spun out from Jersey Telecom for a surprising GBP200 million. </p><p>And that’s on top of KORE Group’s float which I talked about a few weeks ago. </p><p>Ones doing interesting stuff include 1NCE, Blues Wireless, Eseye, floLIVE, Monogoto, and Soracom.</p><p>The changing commercial dynamics in the provision of cellular IoT connectivity, particularly margin erosion, has resulted in an even greater impetus to find sustainable competitive differentiators on something other than the pure provision of connectivity. This is true for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), but it is even more true of MVNOs. The focus of my report was to examine which differentiators, including software platforms, scale, tariffs, coverage, cloud integration, vertical solutions and pre- and post-sales support, will prove to be the most effective.</p><p>To take just one of those, tariffing, historically it was based on some combination of per-device and per-MB charges, reflecting in large part the way in which MNOs charged for their legacy services. In many cases this isn’t particularly appropriate for IoT devices. Tariff innovation has come slowly. To the point where offers such as Soracom’s of no minimum charge and pool plans across a fleet of devices seem innovative, despite the fact that it still charges per-MB. What we’re likely to see in future is a move to charging per MQTT message, API call, or similar, or maybe even pay per outcome. Sierra Wireless has a couple of interesting offers, including of USD1 per device per month with unlimited API calls, or another with USD1 per 1,000 messages. This type of approach removes the complexity for developers who, essentially, don’t want to have to think about how many messages there would be in a MB. This harks back to the value chain question from earlier: focus more on the specific needs of the customer.</p><p>The truth is that, of course, there’s no magic bullet. A number of tactics will be effective in securing a sustainable future for any MVNO. Some better than others. Things relating to vertical services, consulting and anything not easily replicated in software, is a good bet. Having your own connectivity platform or having a dedicated core network is not the differentiator it once was. Most importantly these MVNOs need to be nimble, continuing to evolve their offering to avoid getting overtaken by other new-comers. Secondly, they need to look at multiple methods of differentiation. In such a competitive market, a single differentiator will not be enough. Finally, they need to identify which part of the market they are pursuing and develop a proposition accordingly. It might be embedded developers, the retail sector, AWS customers or any number of other sub-segments of IoT.</p><p>The report itself is available to TI subscribers. </p><p><></p><p>Kudos to the folks at Everynet for announcing the roll out of a US LoRaWAN network. Initial efforts will focus on providing coverage to 36 urban areas and 100 logistics intersections by the end of this year. This is extremely significant news for IoT and many industries within the US. The availability of an extensive public, carrier grade LoRaWAN network will prove crucial to furthering the adoption of a variety of use cases. Likely early adopters can be expected to be from the logistics sector, supporting track & trace and monitoring of transported goods – cold chain monitoring being a particularly relevant use case given the current requirements for vaccine distribution. Urban centres will bring demand from smart cities uses cases, building automation and perhaps smart metering. </p><p>Previously 5G mMTC technologies, LTE-M and NB-IoT, have been the more popular choice for use cases where a public, carrier supported network was required. The availability of alternative choices for such coverage is only going to drive further IoT growth. Competition in the space is only going to further encourage innovation, expansion and development, ultimately providing a greater choice and better service for end users. Crucially for LoRaWAN such a large public network rollout furthers its legitimacy in the LPWA space, and end users that baulked at the complications that come with the operation of a private network will be encouraged to consider LoRaWAN in future projects.</p><p>It’s worth noting a synergy here though: any campus-based LoRaWAN proposition (such as, for instance, in an agricultural, oil & gas, healthcare, or retail park context) can potentially now benefit from ‘roaming’ onto a wider national network to support connectivity when devices are beyond the reach of a private network. A potential approach might be for a large end-user to deploy LoRaWAN private networks at key sites and rely on the nationwide network to support connectivity in-between those sites.</p><p>Either way, it’ll be interesting to watch it evolve.</p><p>Blog post from my colleague Matt Arnott is available on the <a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/everynet-announces-us-lorawan-network">Transforma Insights website</a>.</p><p><></p><p>Last thing, you may remember from a few weeks ago I spoke about a <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/microsoft-leading-hyperscaler-digital-transformation">report comparing the digital transformation capabilities of the hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft and Google</a>. Well, we’ve built on that to develop a <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/ibm-world-leading-dxsp">report looking at 16 Digital Transformation Service Providers (DXSPs)</a> and assessing their capabilities in helping enterprises navigate their Digital Transformation journey. We include companies like Accenture, IBM, Wipro, CGI, KPMG and so on. I will share some more about that in the next episode.</p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-14468802370682126522021-07-28T09:31:00.001+01:002021-08-05T11:26:54.037+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 22: What an analyst loves to see…<p>This week's episode looks at Nokia's new product focused on the emerging opportunity for data exchanges, a deep dive into the changing landscape for IoT connectivity and a look at the opportunity associated with robotic automation.</p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/what-an-analyst-loves-to-see/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5aPWCzkUiVfVpS3BdFPS875xszkDO9Qwp4WAU_us2CuuscumSzbOCT7cOksCGlwMZcUmcZn65jDy4EbvSDzr420dHOhJ_RYyLB73AFsM_tR5d2UFncfjVRhtmg1UiIGJOkzfXT9wbz-ny/s2619/pexels-lukas-590022.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="2619" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5aPWCzkUiVfVpS3BdFPS875xszkDO9Qwp4WAU_us2CuuscumSzbOCT7cOksCGlwMZcUmcZn65jDy4EbvSDzr420dHOhJ_RYyLB73AFsM_tR5d2UFncfjVRhtmg1UiIGJOkzfXT9wbz-ny/s320/pexels-lukas-590022.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. Today I want to share some thoughts on Nokia’s new Data Marketplace platform, the IoT connectivity landscape, and autonomous robotic systems. </p><p><></p><p>Nokia launches a textbook version of a data exchange platform (but with a few unusual features)</p><p>Every so often as an analyst a new product comes along that fits perfectly with how you see the market. Earlier this month the launch in question was Nokia’s ‘Data Marketplace’ . This new product sits squarely in the market space that we describe in one of our twelve Digital Transformation technology families, specifically the data exchange and clearing house functionality within our ‘Data Sharing’ category.</p><p>This is a market space that I have been pushing for quite some time, but with only a limited number of really evolved offerings. The pick of the bunch have been Deutsche Telekom’s Data Intelligence Hub, and KPN’s Data Services Hub.</p><p>Nokia’s offering is a white label as-a-service solution, so that’s a first tick. Big box telecom equipment vendors have had their fingers burnt competing with their Communications Service Provider clients. It’s sensible to instead build a product for CSPs to take to market. The second big plus is that it provides most of the key functionality for access control, policy control, validation and settlement that we would expect to see.</p><p>Also worth noting that it’s not IoT-specific, as should be the case. It’s focusing a lot of attention of IoT, which is understandable given how IoT-generated data is going to be amongst the most valuable and ripe for trading. But inevitably there’s a need for integration with other datasets.</p><p>There are a number of interesting features to the platform. It’s provisioned on a ‘broker’ model, handling access control and rights. It also makes significant use of blockchain for the associated smart contracts. It also allows for AI orchestration, which is not a set of functionality we have seen from other vendors.</p><p>Nokia is clearly conscious that it might not be immediately apparent to a potential CSP adopter how to commercialise this. For that reason, it’s building business model support and some specific applications. There are a number of pre-defined use cases, mostly around IoT including supply chain, car parking and more. Currently this is focused on transport, energy, smart cities and a few others. Transport, energy and smart cities are solid choices. Smart cities because the data is typically easy to share and the motivations of data owners are typically well aligned with a wide distribution, for instance of ensuring that people are aware of train or bus times. Both transport and energy have several stakeholders with a vested interest in sharing data in a timely fashion.</p><p>For more discussion on the features, functionality and architecture, and our views on the strengths and weaknesses of Data Marketplace, see the recent report we published a few weeks ago entitled ‘Nokia Data Marketplace is a strong play for the emerging data exchange market, but is too oriented towards closed user groups’. One of the big issues is that it is too heavily focused on closed user groups rather than truly multi-tenanted systems. This itself raises the question of why it uses blockchain (if the system is essential trustful), and also why the payment mechanism seems to be provisioned as an adjacent system, rather than an integrated part of the offering. But as a first pass at an offering to fit into this space, it looks good. Good news also for data centre partner Equinix as it seeks to find ways to operate in an agile orchestration role rather than going toe-to-toe with the hyperscalers.</p><p><></p><p>Back in May I published a long-gestating report on the future of WAN connectivity for enterprise IoT. While the technology shift in the coming decade is quite interesting, with the maturing of both 5G and LPWA technologies and a greater impact from satellite, it's the commercial changes that will be the most interesting to watch. </p><p>We'll see very definite evolution in the relationships between MNOs, MVNOs and equipment vendors. Recent months have seen quite marked changes in the commercial relationships for wholesale and roaming, with strong indications that MNOs will get tougher, particularly on sponsored ( permanent) roaming. eSIM makes that all the more complicated (or possible more simple if MNOs really wanted to collaborate).</p><p>The growing importance of private networks and the increasing virtualisation of the core increases the blurring of the lines between network operator and infrastructure provider (and end user).</p><p>We'll also see hyperscale cloud providers interject themselves into the market in a very meaningful way.</p><p>And that's just scratching the surface. Change is a comin'.</p><p><></p><p>Another bit of Transforma Insights research that I wanted to highlight was about what we term ‘Autonomous Robotic Systems’, which is one of our 12 Digital Transformation Technology Families. In total we expect 345 million robots that are autonomous, or capable of behaving autonomously, to be in service by 2030, a ten-fold increase over the decade.</p><p>Mostly it’s personal assistance robots, like Roombas. But value-wise it’s largely in manufacturing, for production line equipment and so forth, and in health and social care. </p><p>The manufacturing side of things is particularly interesting to watch. The combination of economic nationalism, industrial automation (IIoT, Industry4.0 etc.) and COVID’s exposure of issues with supply chains means onshoring of manufacturing will be a key trend of the 2020s. Globalisation will increasingly give way to distributed (often additive) manufacturing </p><p>And worth noting that there’s very little autonomous vehicle in there. Off-road for mines and other controlled campus environments, yes. Fleets of road vehicles in the next 10 years? Nope. The technology is just not there yet. </p><p>Link to the report on the Wireless Noodle website: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/autonomous-robotic-systems-ten-fold-growth">HERE</a>.</p><p>And on a related note, There is a disingenuous obsession in the tech community with telling us that new technology will create rather than destroy jobs.</p><p>For many techs (Robotic Process Automation for instance, but also automated robots), eliminating the need for an employee is the raison d’etre of the tech. Be honest.</p><p>And, on the flip side, we also need to recognise that the world doesn’t need to keep creating and maintaining jobs at the rate it has been. In most of Europe there is a declining population already. In a generation (2040) China will be the same. Another generation after that (2060) India, Brazil and many more will be in decline.</p><p>In many rich countries the generation entering the workforce today is the biggest it will ever be. We need to find ways to replace what they do with something automated, because there’s not another worker who will step into their shoes.</p><p>We need to embrace our robot workers (and the fact that they replace people) because we’re going to need them to cope with an aged population.</p><p><br /></p><p><></p><p>Private Networks and the interview with Stephane Daeuble. Fantastic interview - <a href="https://www.iot-now.com/2021/03/05/108122-iot-now-magazine-2021-q1-enterprises-gear-up-to-be-major-iot-players/">LINK HERE</a>.</p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-21029132387041307832021-07-21T07:47:00.002+01:002021-07-21T07:47:43.605+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 21: IoT will save the world!<p>This week Matt delves into the ways in which the Internet of Things will help to avert climate disaster, some troubling survey results, and how IoT cellular connections evolved in 2020.</p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/iot-save-the-world/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoyMowb1CU_0HDOp8AXsUvv-yngJn8wRu7i_1HEdJSWZGgGUcm1OK6hbpvAyeHD2VxlDYpgWcYXLVa6G52JLQuS28o6AQlUuEnJQFCER1Nfc2XPBuyrxKj3oAernCg2YC9NNg-DK9Sl00F/s640/pexels-artem-podrez-7048429.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoyMowb1CU_0HDOp8AXsUvv-yngJn8wRu7i_1HEdJSWZGgGUcm1OK6hbpvAyeHD2VxlDYpgWcYXLVa6G52JLQuS28o6AQlUuEnJQFCER1Nfc2XPBuyrxKj3oAernCg2YC9NNg-DK9Sl00F/s320/pexels-artem-podrez-7048429.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>The Internet of Things will save the world. Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. It’s been another extended gap since the last episode. Things are busy here at Transforma Insights towers. I’ll talk about a few things we’ve been doing in the next couple of weeks. Today I wanted to share details on a major piece of work we did on the environmental impact of new technologies. Plus a few bits of news that caught my eye.</p><p><></p><p>Back in April we published a report we had compiled in conjunction with 6GWorld and InterDigital looking at the impact of disruptive technologies on the environment. And I’m pleased to report that it’s largely positive, particularly the Internet of Things, which is ever close to my heart. </p><p>According to the study, by 2030 IoT deployment and its disruption of various industries is expected to save more than eight times the energy it consumes, 230 billion cubic meters of freshwater, and eliminate one gigaton of CO2 emissions.</p><p>The report, <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/iot-technology-saves-energy-white-paper">Sustainability in New and Emerging Technologies</a>, explores the impact new and emerging technologies will have on electricity, fuel and water usage, CO2 emissions, and eWaste. The report looks at the incremental impact of new technologies by examining the resource impact of enterprise and commercial technologies compared to a world without it. </p><p>Key findings from the report reveal that by 2030: </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>IoT solutions will reduce electricity consumption by more than 1.6 petawatt-hours (PWh), enough electricity to support more than 136.5 million homes' energy use for one year.</li><li>IoT’s net effect on fuel consumption will reach a yearly 3.5 PWh reduction of (hydrocarbon) fuel. </li><li>IoT devices and emerging technologies will conserve nearly 230 billion cubic meters of water – 35% of this impact will result from improved smart water grid operations, and remaining water savings will be supplemented by IoT-enabled agricultural applications like crop management and remote pest control. </li><li>Considering the manufacturing of new and emerging technologies, IoT is expected to increase global electricity use by 34 terawatt-hours (TWh). </li><li>IoT will result in an additional 53 TWh of fuel used for distribution and deployment of solutions. This distribution and deployment will generate incremental eWaste, including additional hardware per device and increased levels of device shipments. The overall impact will be more than 657,000 tonnes of eWaste. </li><li>IoT solutions will collectively enable one gigatonne benefit in CO2 emissions. The impact on CO2 emission is notably lower in regions that have a greater representation of renewable energy in their generating profile.</li></ul><p></p><p>The report identifies the impact of new and emerging technologies on energy and resource usage and spotlights the difference in enterprise and commercial solutions. Enterprise-based IoT capabilities are typically incorporated if they increase efficiency or produce a net economic benefit, often in the form of reduced electricity, fuel, or water consumption. Conversely, connected consumer devices dominate IoT and have a considerable sustainability impact because they typically consume more electricity than their non-connected counterparts. In consumer solutions, IoT capabilities are added to improve the user proposition and tend to be net electricity consumers. </p><p>IoT-enabled solutions like HVAC systems, building automation, and smart lighting all generate sustainability benefits regardless of whether they are deployed in a consumer or enterprise context, and will be the most impactful electricity saving applications (along with smart electricity grid operations). Net energy consumers include commercial based IoT solutions such as CCTV, AV equipment, or personal assistance robots. </p><p>The most impactful IoT solution in terms of fuel savings will be Road Fleet Management of vehicles and delivery vans, accounting for roughly 37% of fuel saved by IoT solutions of all kinds. Emerging technologies with the greatest impact on resource consumption are processing-intensive and deployed to ensure compliance or data optimization.</p><p>Beyond energy savings, water scarcity was listed in 2019 by the World Economic Forum as one of the largest global risks in terms of potential impact over the next decade, and a small number of IoT applications (mostly in the agricultural sector) will result in net savings of 230 billion cubic meters of water in 2030.</p><p>The impact of new emerging technology-based solutions that do not include IoT-connected devices is more of a mixed bag than the impact of IoT-enabled solutions. However, two clear groupings emerge when analysing CO2 impact (which combines both electricity and fuel impact into a single measure).</p><p>At the Use Case level, it is the most widely adopted, processing intensive, non IoT-enabled applications that are intended to improve compliance or reduce risk that are most costly in terms of net CO2 emissions. Use cases like Fraud detection (accounting for 0.67 megatonnes of net CO2 emissions in 2030), Risk Analysis (0.29 megatonnes), and Threat Detection (0.24 megatonnes), are all valuable from an end-user perspective, but they are processing-intensive and generally achieve little in the way of tangible results (from a sustainability perspective).</p><p>Conversely, some applications of (non IoT-enabled) emerging technologies are significantly beneficial in terms of net CO2 impact, with the most beneficial use cases tending to involve interaction with real-world physical processes. For instance ‘x as-a-service’ (accounting for 2.6 megatonnes of net CO2 emissions savings in 2030) includes the proactive and pre-emptive maintenance of assets to ensure that they operate efficiently and do not break down. This saves on remedial maintenance trips, and improved condition monitoring of these assets enables more maintenance to be undertaken during routine service visits. Inventory Management (1.7 megatonnes), Transportation Optimisation (1.1 megatonnes), and Supply Chain Audit (1.0 megatonnes) all include in some way improving the efficiency of physical distribution networks, and so reductions in fuel use.</p><p>What is particularly interesting is that investment in new technology tends to result in costs in terms of electricity consumption (to power the solution), often offset by some level of savings in terms of electricity consumption but more significantly savings in terms of (hydrocarbon) fuel consumption. This is an important dynamic, since it is much easier to source electricity from sustainable sources than it is to source (hydrocarbon) fuel from sustainable sources: i.e. the simple substitution of hydrocarbon fuel consumption with electricity consumption is beneficial from a sustainability perspective.</p><p><></p><p><a href="https://technative.io/keeping-machine-learning-algorithms-humble-and-honest-in-the-ethics-first-era/">Research</a> suggests that 84% of CEOs agree that AI-based decisions must be explainable in order to be trusted </p><p>I think we’ve covered this already when I’ve spoken about oversight. There’s no debate on this topic any more. AI decisions do need to be explainable. Regardless of what the other 16% of CEOs might think. Done. </p><p>Slightly worrying survey results from @UbisenseNews about Industrial IoT adoption under the title ‘<a href="https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/iot-not-fulfilling-promise-2021-04/">IoT not fulfilling its promise</a>’. 43% of manufacturers don’t see value in IoT compared to 29% a year ago. </p><p>The chip shortage may prove good news for #IoT device vendors. Focus on fulfilling orders for higher value gateways and full solutions rather than pile-it-high chipsets. I’m sure someone will tell me I’m wrong, but supply shortage *should* mean higher margins. </p><p><></p><p>At Transforma Insights we closely track Communications Service Providers and how they are addressing the IoT market. We know you loved it last time, so here's an update of the CSP IoT connection ranking. This chart shows the evolution of the numbers of connections from 2010 to 2020.</p><p>The grand total for the accumulated connections of the top 34 operators at end 2020 was 1.43 billion, up from 1.27 billion at end 2019. That's an increase of 160 million (i.e. up 13%) over the year. That is only just less than half the growth in 2019, which was 326 million (which itself represented a growth of 34%).</p><p>Check out the website for more details: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/csp-iot-connections-historic-update">CSP IoT connections tracker</a></p><p>And while we’re on the subject of IoT numbers, at Transforma Insights we have just launched a new public <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/forecast/highlights">IoT Forecast Highlights</a> page;</p><p>Our TAM Forecasts provide our quantitative view of the market opportunity associated with Digital Transformation and all of the associated technologies. As part of this, our Connected Things (IoT) forecasts offer a highly granular analysis of the IoT market until 2030.</p><p>We have decided to make a top level of data available for free. The figures are regularly updated and are a live view of the forecast information contained in our Connected Things (IoT) forecast database. The figures available on this page are free to use on the condition that they are sourced to Transforma Insights.</p><p><></p><p>Finally, we have just wrapped up the <a href="https://transformainsights.com/about/user-group-live">Transforma Insights first User Group Live</a> event at the end of June. We’ll be posting recordings of all the sessions to the website for user group members and our clients to access. If you’re interested in knowing more I’ll post the address to the Wireless Noodle blog: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/about/user-group">HERE</a>. </p><p>Articles…The future of the Internet is articles written solely by ML algorithms and read solely by other AIs for the purposes of further refining their Natural Language Processing</p><p>Next week I’ll be talking about Nokia’s Data Marketplace offering and few other interesting things.</p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle</p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-17272135180215160782021-04-29T09:47:00.005+01:002021-04-29T09:47:53.238+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 20: Lots of Microsoft and a touch of WFT (Working-From-Thailand)<p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. After such a long break before the last episode there has been a lot in the news. So I want to cover that. I also want to talk a little bit more about the motivation for launching our User Group. But before that, more on hyperscalers. </p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/episode-20-lots-of-microsoft-and-a-touch-of-wft/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3qzMqGgbJnQGBHB_PZWroz1ZNgaFU6ub27OME7-PtkaDvOdCnbNWU5u6SJ0WY-lmi_m3fOeFTI8aikWgPW6pxDDHi3qAtbJgKtx2aeMJj7wfW8_idqOqRKvcgcFvzyhvYYwLRHQ2akQSb/s2000/pexels-julius-silver-753626.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1335" data-original-width="2000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3qzMqGgbJnQGBHB_PZWroz1ZNgaFU6ub27OME7-PtkaDvOdCnbNWU5u6SJ0WY-lmi_m3fOeFTI8aikWgPW6pxDDHi3qAtbJgKtx2aeMJj7wfW8_idqOqRKvcgcFvzyhvYYwLRHQ2akQSb/s320/pexels-julius-silver-753626.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>Just recently we at Transforma Insights published a new report about the Digital Transformation strategies and capabilities of AWS, Google and Microsoft. Link to press release: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/microsoft-leading-hyperscaler-digital-transformation">Transforma Insights rates Microsoft the leading hyperscaler in supporting enterprise digital transformation</a>. </p><p>The bulk of the report provides our assessment of the capabilities of each of the vendors for each of the eleven technology families and between 5 and 14 functions per technology family. This includes hardware, software, services, consulting and various other elements. We assess them based on ‘Emerging’, ‘Significant’ or ‘Market Leading’ capabilities and provide tabulated notes on our views on each of the vendors for each of the technology families. We also include recommendations to enterprises on which vendor would be best placed to support them for different functions within the particular technology family.</p><p>Based on the rating of each vendor for each function in each technology family we are then able to rank the vendors, by technology, by role and overall for Digital Transformation. For the purposes of ranking the vendors, we apply a weighting for each function and for the eleven technology families relative to each other.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0cZNYpP4z4Ffjse86QZUQlgc1dsIx9I_8acN4QaJhhDf0sgBqWynKEm29-dp3vo0YgJx7fJMbu9gsINQsYNK4bUCbQ3_r6yTim_26joMOJM4_0Rd9-HHGFF_iQTn8ka8y_EZL1-vUrd0e/s2048/DX12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1246" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0cZNYpP4z4Ffjse86QZUQlgc1dsIx9I_8acN4QaJhhDf0sgBqWynKEm29-dp3vo0YgJx7fJMbu9gsINQsYNK4bUCbQ3_r6yTim_26joMOJM4_0Rd9-HHGFF_iQTn8ka8y_EZL1-vUrd0e/s320/DX12.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p> These weightings allow us to score the overall capabilities of the vendors for Digital Transformation as a whole. </p><p>Microsoft is the overall leading Hyperscaler in its ability to address enterprise requirements for Digital Transformation. AWS is just behind overall, but has some specific strengths. Google trails some distance behind those two in third place.</p><p>In terms of absolute ratings, we compared the capabilities of all 3 against a theoretical ‘maximum’ for an organisation that is ‘Market Leading’ in every aspect of providing Digital Transformation across all technologies. Of course, no such company exists, but it provides a scale against which we can benchmark vendors. In total Microsoft has secured a rating of 52% compared to that theoretical maximum, AWS 42% and Google 25%.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhdrExjohIdV82PpSrBzsyTkepF4cCeqZdPoMVZSTfpOnNkG3QZ5jY8u33hK3XjqC7SQJoN8Uj0Dg7pf8QSUznuWigxAj3Xc5ATkFDbkz39iUQm9BdahYCcIxAgzKy4TzQP9YUeg0GLeJ5/s1012/VendorRankingHyperscalers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="658" data-original-width="1012" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhdrExjohIdV82PpSrBzsyTkepF4cCeqZdPoMVZSTfpOnNkG3QZ5jY8u33hK3XjqC7SQJoN8Uj0Dg7pf8QSUznuWigxAj3Xc5ATkFDbkz39iUQm9BdahYCcIxAgzKy4TzQP9YUeg0GLeJ5/s320/VendorRankingHyperscalers.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>AWS and Microsoft particularly perform well in ‘software products’, reflecting their heavy software focus and ability to deliver the off-the-shelf products covered in the category. They also rate high for integrated solutions (i.e. full products aimed at addressing specific client requirements), application development and specialist services. It should be noted that for the latter two categories these vendors tend not to commercialise their offerings directly to end users, for instance not providing application development for third parties. Their strong showing in those categories is generally for internal purposes only (a distinguishing characteristic which we highlight in our analysis of each technology). Where these three companies tend to fall down is on two areas. They have limited capabilities in delivering hardware, although they are market leaders in particular areas such as Human Machine Interface. They also score poorly in two other categories: systems integration & project management, and field & operational services, both of which are inherently less scalable. The hyperscalers general eschew elements of delivering Digital Transformation that require large teams of people focused on delivering for a single client. That type of work they leave to consultants.</p><p>All three score very well in Artificial Intelligence and Edge Computing. There are few surprises in that result; the hyperscalers represent three of the most innovative companies in those fields in the world. Both AWS and Microsoft also score strongly in IoT, although the relative maturity and diversity of requirements in that field mean that they do not score as high as they do for AI and Edge. Other segments are much more mixed. Microsoft is a market leader in RPA and aspects of HMI and there are some minor strong points in Autonomous Robotic Systems, Data Sharing, Distributed Ledger and Hyperconnectivity.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjswjN23FsvU2wmyxxpbYiqs0qcJy95XCB9puaiRsAOc09liUG4HL9cVR1vlcIH_rpnuMdLAcqi62CRNg3DwXxleqdnP3oxjyX8tWzlTE44NSecuxWxDuiVx5Suv9_xzAxxJ2gb-A3RYRUd/s991/VendorRatingsHyperscalers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="771" data-original-width="991" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjswjN23FsvU2wmyxxpbYiqs0qcJy95XCB9puaiRsAOc09liUG4HL9cVR1vlcIH_rpnuMdLAcqi62CRNg3DwXxleqdnP3oxjyX8tWzlTE44NSecuxWxDuiVx5Suv9_xzAxxJ2gb-A3RYRUd/s320/VendorRatingsHyperscalers.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>The message for enterprise adopters is that Microsoft overall is the lead vendor to support a Digital Transformation, but that hides quite a bit of diversity. For early adopters looking for cutting-edge solutions, AWS is generally a step or two ahead of Microsoft. </p><p>Report on AWS: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/aws-reinvent-showcases-broad-portfolio">AWS re:Invent showcases a broad portfolio focused on solving industry needs</a> </p><p>However, when it comes to breadth of offering and mass-market delivery, Microsoft is the clear lead. </p><p>See this report for more details: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/microsoft-industry-clouds-consulting">New ‘industry clouds’ and enhanced consulting capabilities mark a change in Microsoft’s DX proposition</a> </p><p>Google has some particular niche capabilities, and is often favoured by developers, particularly in AI, although it seems unable to translate that into mass market adoption.</p><p><></p><p>Quick round-up of some very interesting news stories from the last few weeks:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Microsoft (aforementioned) bought Nuance Communications which does natural language processing, speech recognition, that kind of thing. It’s a key part of an AI strategy, and it means it’s well position for voice to become the main UI, which at some point it will.</li><li>More on the topic of Microsoft, it won an eye-watering $22bn contract to provide augmented reality headsets for the military over 10 years. </li><li>Verizon sold its first overseas mobile private network deal with Associated British Ports. Incidentally I had an interview with them as a fresh-faced 21 year old. The interviewer smoked all the way through the interview. Different time. Anyhow, just more evidence of how the connectivity market is being turned on its head at the moment. As I’ve spoken about many times before. If you’re interested in Mobile Private Networks I strongly recommend you check out an interview I did with Stephane Daeuble from Nokia about MPNs. Really great stuff. Link will be on the Wireless Noodle website at wirelessnoodle.com as usual. Link <a href="https://www.iot-now.com/2021/03/09/108199-will-cellular-private-networks-power-enterprise-iot/?source=ttnokiahtml">HERE</a>.</li><li>Sierra Wireless suffered from a ransomware attack which shut down its website and its production for several days. Website OK. Production? I can’t help thinking that sometimes IT/OT integration goes a bit too far. Or certainly isn’t done with sufficient security. They’re back up and running again now and with a neat new product, the Acculink Cargo a managed solution for asset tracking. With connectivity being increasingly commoditised MVNOs (and I’m including Sierra in that even though most their business is hardware) will need to focus on building products. Like KORE has done in healthcare. Or Aeris in automotive. Undifferentiated connectivity is not a sustainable market. </li><li>Oh, and speaking of KORE, it announced an IPO, in a round-about way. It’s been acquired by a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC)</li><li>Lots of discussion around semiconductors recently and specifically (a) a shortage which seems to be having a short term impact on some companies, and (b) how the likes of Intel is onshoring production as a strategic imperative. We’ve not really seen silicon foundries as a strategic asset until now, but they absolutely are. Expect more geopolitics around this in the coming few years.</li></ul><p></p><p>I know there’s been a lot more happening than that, but that’s a few things that I noticed in the last few weeks. </p><p><></p><p>On last week’s episode I talked about the launch of the TI User Group…</p><p>A few weeks ago, we launched the Transforma Insights User Group, a new member community for technology adopters who are responsible for their company’s digital transformation.</p><p>The main driver behind establishing the User Group is to create a community of executives (which includes Chief Digital Officers, those working in Innovation Business Units, and similar) to share their experiences and best practice in deploying technologies such as the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain. That sharing between the members will also, of course, be complimented by the Transforma Insights analysts providing our perspectives on all the latest key technology trends.</p><p>While the discussions of the technologies themselves will be important, we actually expect those discussions to be eclipsed by a more important set of conversations: what do enterprises need to do to adapt their company to best take advantage of the technologies. In a blog post a few months (https://transformainsights.com/blog/eight-internal-factors-iot-digital-transformation) ago I shared some perspectives on the process, business model, finance, people, partnership, systems and culture change that is likely to be necessary, not to mention the change management that is implicit.</p><p>It’s also worth noting that in the Transforma Insights webinar back in July entitled <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/webinar-7-ways-harness-ai-iot-disruptive">'7 ways to harness AI, IoT and other disruptive technologies for competitive advantage</a>’ (which is available on replay to User Group members, which includes some free options currently) we focused not on the technologies that you need to use, but on the commercial and operational strategies you need to make sure that you are best able to harness (or avoid) disruption when it comes. So, the focus is on horizon scanning, project prioritisation, project team organisation, organisational flexibility, and (the aforementioned) change management, amongst other things. Getting Digital Transformation right is 90% about putting in place the business building blocks and only 10% about the technology.</p><p>Interestingly enough, as similar major theme emerges from Jim’s recent report which was written exclusively for the User Group ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/2020-review-top-digital-transformation-use-cases-technologies">2020 Review of Top Digital Transformation Use Cases and Technologies</a>’ which walked through all the impact of Covid on how organisations might be thinking about Digital Transformation. The most important impact wasn’t directly due to the emergence of new technologies, but due to the changing working patterns that have been enabled or encouraged. Remote working and increased globalisation is one key theme. Jobs are increasingly footloose. I chaired a session at the Digital Week Southeast Asia event this week on the changing digital skills requirements in Thailand, and one of the interesting potential opportunities for that country was for footloose employees to relocate; maybe rather than WFH, in future many of us will WFT (work from Thailand). Or, maybe it’s just the jobs that will move, not the people. Another major theme was the requirement for supply chain diversity and resilience, plus the strong potential for greater on-shoring of manufacturing. The technology capabilities that enable these changes are certainly not the complex part of the equation, it’s the operational changes that need to be made.</p><p>This idea of focusing on the business outcome rather than the technology permeates what we do in the User Group. Every quarter our focus switches to a new business theme. For 2021 these include the demands of a post-Covid world and how technology is being used by businesses to adapt, how to scale and build resiliency at different stages of digital implementation, using data to drive competitive advantage, and how best to meet your ESG goals. The quarterly schedule includes podcasts, on-demand, and live case studies, exclusive reports, webinars, deep-dive interviews, interactive panel discussions, and exclusive roundtable workshops.</p><p>You can learn more about the User Group via <a href="https://transformainsights.com/about/user-group.">this link</a>.</p><p><></p><p>A little something that caught my eye recently was Next CEO Lord Wolfson talking about retailer Next’s recent transformation, and specifically the approach it took to developing it. No grand strategy. Mercifully not reliant on a boardroom vision. And no ten year plan. And I quote: “Instead, the business has followed the money, developing new ideas bottom up, drawing on innovations generated throughout the group ‐ new product ranges, new businesses, new distribution channels, services, partnerships and markets”. That’s the way to do it. Maintain flexibility all the way through the process. He also talks about an inconvenient truth: retail stores are at a fundamental and irreversible disadvantage to online. No head-in-the-sand approach here. </p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>Next week I will talk to you about how IoT will save the planet, based on some research we’ve been doing with InterDigital.</p><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-10610624376475005252021-04-23T14:42:00.003+01:002021-04-29T09:37:53.766+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 19: A new string to the bow<p>This week's Wireless Noodle looks at the a White Paper Transforma Insights did with Telia on 'hyperscale IoT connectivity', some new moves from Microsoft on industry clouds and consulting, and the launch of the Transforma Insights User Group.</p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/new-string-to-the-bow/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbvAEXNhESWK1KZCdllbv9euM-6pUnez20tDBOop04jsodWeR6xU-KvHR8i9xNuL-PZ3UQrFM-PA1IsmcuZJHdDNuNVlH_crbwyBM6BlqBfr407J7tNL47zKb5gVzOXAAgSw7kH318SwYf/s1280/pexels-rodnae-productions-6669043.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="1280" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbvAEXNhESWK1KZCdllbv9euM-6pUnez20tDBOop04jsodWeR6xU-KvHR8i9xNuL-PZ3UQrFM-PA1IsmcuZJHdDNuNVlH_crbwyBM6BlqBfr407J7tNL47zKb5gVzOXAAgSw7kH318SwYf/w320-h196/pexels-rodnae-productions-6669043.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. It’s been a while. Over 2 months since the last one. Work has picked up. But I’m getting back into the swing and I’ve got quite a lot of stuff to report. The biggest thing is probably the Transforma Insights User Group, more on which later. And we have unveiled oodles of great research at TI. So I’ll want to talk a bit about that over the next few episodes. Catch you up on what I’ve been up to.</p><p><></p><p>First up, a white paper on ‘Hyperscale IoT Connectivity’ we did in conjunction with the good people at Telia. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always focused a lot on connectivity. Masters in telecoms, historically a mobile analyst. That sort of thing. As I’ve discussed recently, a lot of things are changing in the connectivity landscape. Mostly on the technology side. But there’s much more to it than that. Demand is also changing significantly. The requirements of any enterprise for seamless global connectivity with cloud integration and various other features is rising. </p><p>On the 26th February we published a White Paper entitled ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/enterprises-billions-hyperscale-iot-connectivity">Hyperscale IoT Connectivity could save enterprises 28% of their global connectivity cost</a>’. The starting point for the White Paper is the current state of IoT connectivity. A decade ago, the ways in which global connected devices were supported was relatively simple but has changed immeasurably in the last decade with the arrival of new technologies, increasing complexity in regulation and the shift to the cloud, to name but three. </p><p>The way in which connectivity is provided must keep up. That’s why we’re advocating a new hyperscale approach to connectivity which meets the new demands for localization, security, cloud integration and compliance.</p><p>For this reason, we advocate for a connectivity solution with a number of particular characteristics that make it more suitable for IoT in the 2020s. Firstly they must be local, which includes localising connectivity using eSIM/eUICC, as well as data management; local compliance is the key. It must also be adaptive to different architectures including cloud and edge, as well as quick to deploy into new territories. Thirdly it needs to be secure, extending the enterprise’s security perimeter out to the edge device. Finally, it must be collaborative and interoperable between the diverse members of the IoT ecosystem. We term solutions that meet these criteria ‘Hyperscale IoT Connectivity’.</p><p>The report outlines USD117 billion in cost savings that can be made by enterprises over the next decade by using this Hyperscale approach. The White Paper demonstrates how critical it is for enterprises adopting IoT to make the right choices in their connectivity provider. Decisions around connectivity have focused too much on shaving a few cents off data rates. That misses the point that choosing wisely in a connectivity solution can accelerate time-to-market, guarantee compliance, ease integration with cloud platforms and help in numerous other ways that benefit the deploying organisation out of all proportion of the cost of the connectivity.</p><p>The aim with the White Paper is to focus the attention of would-be customers on the need to consider every aspect of their IoT project when making their choice of connectivity partner. Bad decisions, by selecting a connectivity solution that will not scale to the demands of the 2020s, will end up costing adopters over $100 billion.</p><p>In total we identify eleven main ways in which enterprises will benefit from selecting a Hyperscale-friendly solution. These range from greater supply chain efficiency, courtesy of using eSIM, through to more streamlined device-to-cloud integration giving a superior and more consistent global deployment experience. Other benefits include faster time-to-market for companies deciding the move into overseas markets, and superior security mitigating the cost of layering on additional measures. Further details can be found in the White Paper.</p><p>On average, our analysis tells us that enterprises can save costs equivalent to 28% of their connectivity spend. This figure hides a lot of variation. In the manufacturing vertical, for instance, the cost savings over the next decade could more than exceed the total spent by the sector on connectivity.</p><p>Link <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/enterprises-billions-hyperscale-iot-connectivity">here</a>. </p><p><></p><p>Speaking of Hyperscale. That’s a term I’ve *ahem* borrowed from discussion of a different set of companies. Hyperscale cloud providers. Principally this covers Microsoft, AWS and Google, but could include the likes of Facebook, Apple, Oracle, IBM and SAP. </p><p>Back in March I wrote a <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/microsoft-industry-clouds-consulting">report</a> about one of them: Microsoft, and specifically its ‘industry clouds’ solution.</p><p>The last six months have seen a flurry of announcements about Microsoft’s ‘industry clouds’ offerings. Cloud for Healthcare was introduced in October 2020, with early 2021 seeing a more expanded offering covering Financial Services, Manufacturing, Nonprofit and Retail. These new product suites represent a significant switch towards more verticalised offerings, tailored to particular vertical sectors.</p><p>Earlier in 2020 we also saw another significant switch aimed at better addressing the enterprise market. In July, Microsoft launched its Consulting Services business unit as part of its Cross-Industry Solutions group. The new unit is focused on strategic advisory, project guidance and implementation of Microsoft technologies. </p><p>These two moves mark a shift away from being a horizontally oriented products-only company towards providing a much more holistic set of vertical-specific services supported by consulting services for customization and implementation. </p><p>Our new report examines the capabilities and remit of the industry clouds and Microsoft Consulting Services and offers our perspectives on how valuable its offering will be to enterprise adopters. </p><p>The conclusion, broadly, is that the industry clouds offerings have the potential to cement Microsoft’s hold over mainstream IT products. The productisation of what would historically have been implemented as custom builds is a natural evolution to the platformisation inherent in ICT. </p><p>As a side-note Jim Morrish at Transforma Insights has recently published a report looking at what Systems Integrators need to do to react to this challenge to their position. After all, if everything is being productised, what do the companies who do the customising turn to next? But I digress.</p><p>For Microsoft, it marks a notable strategic shift and a potential game changer, both in terms of building an even stickier portfolio of services for the enterprises, as well as providing a simple adoption path to the granular adoption of Microsoft’s AI capabilities. </p><p>The success or otherwise of the consulting business is much more difficult to predict. The approach that Microsoft will take with it is not yet clear, although we can make some assumptions. Its ambition should be to use that organisation as a support act for the industry clouds, both in terms of learning about vertical client needs and in providing technical support for products which will never be quite off-the-shelf.</p><p>On the subject of hyperscalers, I will come back to that next week when I talk at length about a report that we’ve just published comparing the capabilities overall in all aspects of digital transformation between Microsoft, AWS and Google. </p><p><></p><p>Finally. As promised. Big news from us is that we’ve launched a new part to the business. Specifically it’s the <a href="https://transformainsights.com/about/user-group">Transforma Insights User Group</a>.</p><p>How we describe it is as a year-round, engaged and informed, subscription-based member community, connecting technology end users who are navigating their digital transformation journey.</p><p>The User Group unites professionals with common goals and responsibilities in a trusted environment, to exchange lessons in new technologies, emerging use cases and enterprise change management. </p><p>The TI User Group facilitates structured discussion and the sharing of ideas to allow members to grow their knowledge base and foster partnerships between leading technology stakeholders and enterprise adopters.</p><p>For details on membership, the year’s schedule and member benefits, see <a href="http://transformainsights.com/about/user-group">transformainsights.com/about/user-group</a></p><p>OK, so who is it for? It’s for adopters of IoT, AI and any other disruptive technology. Could be Chief Information Officer or Chief Digital Officer or someone sitting within an innovation BU. Essentially it’s anyone interested in how new tech will influence their business. And it’s across all verticals. In fact we’re thinking that one of the interesting things will be how businesses can learn off other sectors. </p><p>What do you get? Every quarter we’ll have a theme, be it digital transformation in the post-COVID era or building data driven competitive advantage. Based on that theme we will have exclusive reports, podcasts, virtual events, collaboration sessions and meet ups. </p><p>And there’s a special closed door collaborative discussion forum for premium members. </p><p>Of course a lot of this will be primed by Transforma Insights analyst contributions and other experts on the latest technology trends and enterprise issues. But ultimately it will be built on a community of users all sharing best practice on technologies, use cases and business issues related to ‘Digital Transformation’. We’re very excited about the prospect.</p><p>If you would like to hear more there will be a link on the <a href="https://transformainsights.com/about/user-group">Transforma Insights website</a>. </p><p><></p><p>Really finally this time, we’re hiring. If you know a great candidate to be a Principal Analyst and/or VP Research in North America, please drop us a line. We’re looking for a face-of-the-company type to speak at events, write some thought leading research and spend a lot of face time with clients (when we’re finally allowed again). Mail careers@transformainsights.com if you know someone. Or if you are someone. </p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>Next week I will be talking more about hyperscalers, and the User Group and sharing some of the news that caught my eye in the many weeks since we were last doing this. </p><div><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle</p></div>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-78066027502353363202021-02-10T16:50:00.001+00:002021-02-10T16:50:10.090+00:00Wireless Noodle Episode 18: Google's Trust Issue<p>This week's Wireless Noodle looks at the whether Google has an issue with enteprises trusting the longevity of its product portfolio, the promotion of Andy Jassy to be the new CEO at Amazon and an exploration of the Robotic Process Automation opportunity.</p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/googles-trust-issue/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>An approximate transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6oeJWcXCqfKbaxhs_b6QiqSwcEcSIdGtPLXnbsSinh7vGrliiGAgr7DVBdsnTEoXJdj7griZSFSNORI0HbO63xSnjjTaI_oevp_dAYJhss0BHcZF1WiICFtAI90qSHG4Mn4sHEik2DJTM/s2549/pexels-mododeolhar-5241772.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="2549" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6oeJWcXCqfKbaxhs_b6QiqSwcEcSIdGtPLXnbsSinh7vGrliiGAgr7DVBdsnTEoXJdj7griZSFSNORI0HbO63xSnjjTaI_oevp_dAYJhss0BHcZF1WiICFtAI90qSHG4Mn4sHEik2DJTM/s320/pexels-mododeolhar-5241772.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p>Recently I was talking about Amazon, and particularly AWS. And now Andy Jassy has been promoted to head up Amazon in the wake of Jeff Bezos’s kinda retirement. </p><p>Good appointment. Jassy has the right attitude of constant reinvention and improvement which will keep the Amazon juggernaut rolling. But the biggest challenges are likely to be political in the future. The sheer importance of Amazon to the supply chain in many countries has been demonstrated during Covid. Things coming like drone delivery and so forth. Not clear how well he’ll deal with those. Cloud computing isn’t particularly political at the moment, although critical national infra. Not clear how well Bezos would have dealt with them either but that’s by the by.</p><p>The interesting thing is the extent to which everyone is reading so much into this in terms of the rising importance of AWS within Amazon. It’s impt, of course. Good revenue growth and a successful business unit. But I think Jassy’s rise has been more to do with him doing a good job of running what is, to all intents and purposes, a separate business, very effectively. Does it change the emphasis Amazon should or will put on AWS. Not reason to believe it will. </p><p>I won’t go over AWS stuff again. Today actually I want to focus on another of the hyperscalers, which is Google. </p><p>For more on AWS's strategy see this blogpost '<a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/aws-reinvent-dont-make-users-change">AWS re:Invent: don’t make your users change, serve them as you find them</a>' and report '<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/aws-reinvent-showcases-broad-portfolio">AWS re:Invent showcases a broad portfolio focused on solving industry needs</a>'</p><p><></p><p>Google Cloud has a trust issue. It keeps shutting down products. So anyone choosing their products for critical systems might be concerned.</p><p>Starting point: Google wants to be seen as a diversified tech company (in which it has mkt share of 1-2%) rather than just a search Ad company (for which it has, what?, 80% market share). Many of the wacky things that it does and investments it makes are aimed at portraying it as a diversified tech company. It doesn’t matter if they succeed or fail. </p><p>We’ve seen numerous examples where it’s been allowed to fail. Back in earlier podcast I mentioned Revolv, whose smart home products were shut down by Google. Other examples are Stadia and Google Health and a bunch of others. Most recently it dumped Loon, it’s plan to provide connectivity with hot air balloons in the upper atmosphere. Sounds crazy. Might have worked. Didn’t really matter to Google if it did or not. </p><p>But does allowing those companies or products or projects to fail have a negative effect on its brand image when it comes to its other business?</p><p>Clearly not to its core search business. But what about other enterprise services on which clients may come to rely. I <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/google-cloud-limited-toolkit-enterprise-digital-transformation">wrote a report recently on google’s rather thin portfolio of products</a> aimed at enterprise digital transformation. </p><p>Those products are potentially critical systems though for any company adopting them. </p><p>Would you as an enterprise trust in Google Cloud or using Google Workspace or smaller initiatives like Contact Center AI? Or would you think that maybe Google will get bored with those too?</p><p>Now maybe I’m over-thinking it. Why would it ditch cloud computing? Well, it probably won’t. Mostly because it’s rather inseparable from what it does as its core business. </p><p>As with AWS who I talked about a few weeks ago, Google more or less stumbled on cloud computing as a by-product of its main line of business. Which means it’s pretty hard to extract that bit of the business from the wider business. So it’s likely cloud is safe.</p><p>But any enhancements layered on top of cloud? Well, who knows. Workspace (what used to be G-Suite) which is email, calendar, storage and so on – maybe. Look at Google Photos, which decided to start charging for storage about 15GB. Hard to say that it’s unreasonable to introduce a fee. But it all points to it being happy to chop and change offerings. </p><p>And what about even more specialist capabilities which end up proving to be unprofitable. Companies investing lots of money to base their customer care on Google’s Contact Center AI. Well, that’s not core business for Google. Might they get bored? Maybe. Or its Looker acquisition for enterprise data analytics and visualisation. It’s very easy to see a company embedding those capabilities into its systems only for it to be switched off.</p><p>The point is that Google can’t have it both ways. If it’s a diversified technology conglomerate it has to expect that the way it treats some of its products will be perceived as how it might treat all of its products. I think Google has quite a bit of work to do to persuade the market that its products will be in for the long term.</p><p>Contrast this with AWS’s announcements at re:Invent. Announcements like long term support for FreeRTOS. Google Cloud needs some similar ways of reinforcing that it doesn’t have its parent’s predilection for switching things off. It could be by spinning out the company, but that REALLY doesn’t fit with Google’s approach of being as diversified as possible. </p><p><></p><p>Another thing from the Transforma Insights team since last we spoke is that we’ve published a new report looking at Robotic Process Automation (RPA). I’ve talked about it as a topic a little bit in the past. </p><p>It’s based on automating assorted relatively mundane business process tasks that are undertaken manually on a PC. The task is observed by intelligent agent which replicates user behaviour (e.g. open email, download file x, extract data from file x, put into file y).</p><p>Typically useful at removing friction between different enterprises’ systems (e.g. invoice from company x being processed by company y).</p><p>Typically used for accounting and customer care and various admin tasks. </p><p>Slightly more sophisticated than scripts and macros due to the observation and replication.</p><p>It’s a small but critical element of digital transformation, and one of the first ways that many enterprises will experience simple machine learning. The key reason for companies using RPA is clear: to automate IT-based tasks that would have previously been undertaken by a human. Typically, this is by way of bots that track and replicate human behaviour. The aim is to increase accuracy of processes, save costs and improve productivity.</p><p><a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/enterprises-spend-usd13-billion-rpa-2030-demand-decline">Transforma Insights expects the total market spend on RPA will increase from USD1.2 billion in 2020 to USD13 billion in 2030</a>. Market growth peaks in 2027, although total annual market value continues to grow throughout the forecast period. Gradually the requirement for RPA, which is a ‘brownfield’ technology, diminishes as alternative forms of native automation start to reduce the importance of retrofitting a solution to legacy practices. For instance, a process for handling incoming invoices may well be replaced by a fully automated system with no need to replicate a human’s activities.</p><p>In 2025 we expect ‘Professional, Scientific & Technical’ (which includes legal and accounting businesses), ‘Information & Communication’ and ‘Finance & Insurance’ to be the largest sectors. These three are, today, in the vanguard of adopters, using RPA to streamline core processes particularly related to document handling.</p><p>By 2030, the manufacturing sector will have overtaken the others to be the biggest sector, accounting for 19% of the entire market. This shift reflects mostly the size of the manufacturing sector (which accounts for 17% of the world’s economy), but also the increasing use of alternative automation capabilities for the early adopting sectors. It should be noted also that the use cases are overwhelmingly not specific to the vertical, for instance relating to invoicing, document processing or data management.</p><p>The most active region for RPA is North America, accounting for 35% of global spend in 2030 (down from over 50% in 2020). Europe will represent 26% of global spend in 2030. China accounts for only 17% of global spend in 2030, while Japan (with only a tenth the population) accounts for 9%. The dynamic is quite clear: markets with more entrenched low automation IT systems will have a greater requirement for brownfield RPA solutions.</p><p>As well as the forecasts, the report also examines key use cases (including accounting, administration, customer care and HR), the experience of companies that have adopted RPA (based on the analysis of hundreds of deployments from our Best Practice & Vendor Selection Database) and the likely evolution of the market.</p><p>The latter topic is critical. As noted above, RPA is typically applied only to legacy systems. As greater process automation is introduced to IT systems, the requirement for the retro-fit brownfield version inevitably diminishes. Similarly, there is only a limited number of processes to be replaced. Inevitably RPA will eventually become redundant. This necessitates a shift from the vendors to focus on tasks that require more creative problem solving through greater use of machine learning (variously know as Intelligent Automation or Cognitive RPA). </p><p><></p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>Next week I am expecting to unwrap a couple of pieces of interesting news that we’ve been directly involved with here at Transforma Insights. I’ll be able to share more then. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><></p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>Next week I am expecting to unwrap a couple of pieces of interesting news that we’ve been directly involved with here at Transforma Insights. I’ll be able to share more then. </p><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p><div><br /></div>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-39480531501226372922021-01-20T17:31:00.002+00:002021-01-20T17:31:50.527+00:00Wireless Noodle Episode 17: The CES that never was...<p>This week Matt takes a look at the trends from the Consumer Electronics Show, which should have been happening in Las Vegas last week but instead happened virtually. Also a round up of a couple of other interesting webinars and conferences sessions, plus a new report from Transforma Insights looking at IoT connectivity.</p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/ces-never-was/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>, <a href="https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/115df84d-8365-4f08-b943-3abb4fe9084e/The-Wireless-Noodle">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6vC9LlQ3FVxnVzA3a4b4Rf">Spotify</a>. </p><p>No transcript this week, but below there are some highlights of what was in this week's show.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHY69gTxt5UPm9c00d-ZDNBV7uBPd7uhyphenhyphengN3-b2ORiScvijwiaHvjOm_yDJ8IPJg55cutlWQ5PpET2TTZbnUpF4ApxwhyF9bYhcVkgkadazsqXxM4YdsEMBu_OReTWY5jSRG3lZFVWmXYN/s2222/vintage-music-business-shop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1073" data-original-width="2222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHY69gTxt5UPm9c00d-ZDNBV7uBPd7uhyphenhyphengN3-b2ORiScvijwiaHvjOm_yDJ8IPJg55cutlWQ5PpET2TTZbnUpF4ApxwhyF9bYhcVkgkadazsqXxM4YdsEMBu_OReTWY5jSRG3lZFVWmXYN/s320/vintage-music-business-shop.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>First up was an entirely unscientific analysis of what happened at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in its virtual incarnation. First up was a load of security and connected home announcements including from Amazon on end-to-end encryption, Hex Home, Alarm.com, Cync, and a great idea from Samsung for reusing your old smartphones as sensors. There were lots of other useful new products, particularly focused on Water, Air, Health and Fitness. A sign of the times! There were surprisingly few crazy connected devices, compared to the heyday of such things in the early 2010s. There was the $3,000 cat flap, a robot butler and the world's most expensive bath (actually probably not even the most expensive, but pretty expensive). A few things were missing. AI, AR/VR and 5G were surprisingly thin on the ground. Although there was plenty of AI-washing and 5G-washing.</p><p>The next part of the podcast looked at some recent and forthcoming conferences/events/webinars including:</p><p>The IoT & M2M Council's <a href="https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=reg20.jsp&partnerref=IFIS&eventid=2873914&sessionid=1&key=62C4702743B1B8F91ABBC76BE4330B20&regTag=&V2=false&sourcepage=register">V2X is the Future of Connected Automotive</a> talking about the evolution from connected to autonomous vehicle.</p><p><a href="https://info.ioterop.com/smartcitywebinar">Cellular IoT for Smart City: An Evolving Landscape</a> - looking at the growing requirement for device management</p><p>[Hopefully the above two are available on replay via those links]</p><p>Also a preview of <a href="https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/conference/">The Things Conference</a>, which is happening next week. Matt will be talking about how to do forecasts, and running a workshop on it. So if you want your own forecast of how to get to 50 billion IoT devices, tune in. </p><p>Finally, Matt covered a new Transforma Insights report on hyperconnectivity. Press release <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/new-transforma-insights-forecast-internet-of-things">HERE</a>.</p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p><div><br /></div>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-59678812312987455632021-01-13T14:06:00.001+00:002021-01-13T14:06:06.576+00:00Wireless Noodle Episode 16: Don’t make them come to you, serve them as you find them<p>This week's Wireless Noodle looks at the announcements from Amazon Web Services' reInvent event, and what it tells us about the strategy of what will be one of the most important companies in IoT, AI, edge and other digital transformation technologies. Also on the agenda this week, a look at a recent article from Matt about the use of diverse technologies for IoT, particularly unlicensed LPWA, and some thoughts stemming from an interview he did recently with Ross Gray of Sierra Wireless.</p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/serve-them-as-you-find-them/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>. And shortly to be available on Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible and more.</p><p>The full transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGapK6OG3FKCC0HXOCHTWo3zChu_Q3q7rDTl1WvNVoOl-J36T54_5vyjBhecknk028XC5Dl1vKlTxLMyr9a4lIO-qgPBSb6csfyRvNBliueFUXKOVYoJ9fH5K3I0MD6YMXcYEe1U0gOHW-/s2048/pexels-ekrulila-3837487.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1209" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGapK6OG3FKCC0HXOCHTWo3zChu_Q3q7rDTl1WvNVoOl-J36T54_5vyjBhecknk028XC5Dl1vKlTxLMyr9a4lIO-qgPBSb6csfyRvNBliueFUXKOVYoJ9fH5K3I0MD6YMXcYEe1U0gOHW-/s320/pexels-ekrulila-3837487.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. This week I want to give a quick update on AWS’s re:Invent virtual conference which I spent a lot of time enjoying in December. In particular I want to focus on a maxim that I believe is a good one to live by in the tech world, and one which AWS has demonstrated its aptitude for. Don’t make them come to you, serve them as you find them. </p><p>Plus, I want to talk a little bit about a couple of contributions I made to the latest edition of IoT Now magazine, one looking at the requirement for diverse connectivity options, and the other based on a quite interesting interview I did with Ross Gray at Sierra Wireless.</p><p><></p><p>During December I tuned in to a stack of the content of AWS’s re:Invent conference, which this year was held as a virtual event. As you can probably tell from the previous podcasts, I’m very keen to keep a beady eye on AWS and what it’s doing, not least because it cuts across so many of the technology areas that I’m interesting in, including AI, IoT and edge. Last week at Transforma Insights we published a report called ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/aws-reinvent-showcases-broad-portfolio">AWS re:Invent showcases a broad portfolio focused on solving industry needs</a>’ https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/aws-reinvent-showcases-broad-portfolio which gave my views on the myriad of new product launches and developments. If you want to get the full view I recommend checking out the report, but I thought it was worth giving the high level perspective.</p><p>The announcements came thick and fast, covering AI hardware, enhancements to its SageMaker AI offering, end-to-end IoT offerings, enhanced edge computing capabilities and many more. CEO Andy Jassy filled his keynote to the brim with announcements and there were more to follow, particularly from Swami Sivasubramanian, the General Manager for Machine Learning Services.</p><p>The overwhelming sense I got from watching the re:Invent keynotes was of a company that thinks very carefully about the practical application of technology. As one which more-or-less stumbled across its profitable cloud business as a by-product of its main line of business, perhaps that’s not too surprising. It doesn’t do technology for technology’s sake. It does it toe achieve a particular goal. IoT, AI, edge computing and connectivity are crashed together in user-friendly services aimed at delivering predictive maintenance or some other similar capability. They obviously live and breathe the maxim of ‘users don’t buy technology, they buy solutions’.</p><p>‘Applied technology’ is the buzz phrase, or should be. AWS is great at delivering accessible and applied tools, and particularly at ‘brownfield’ type solutions, meeting client needs as they exist today rather than hopefully building a perfect solution that may be decades off being suitable for any real world user. Take the examples of Monitron and Panorama. </p><p>Monitron is a vibration monitoring solution for industrial equipment that is designed to be slapped on the side of an existing piece of equipment and will then monitor it for abnormal behaviour. It’s nothing new technologically, but it’s nicely packaged and keenly priced and most importantly it’s ready to go now.</p><p>Panorama is a video processing technology for applying machine vision to video streams from surveillance cameras. Again, this is for brownfield kit, where the analytics is applied to existing devices without any need to change how they are deployed.</p><p>Both of these recognise that their respective opportunities are retrofit ones. There’s also a similar approach to the machine learning proposition, which considers the fact that there are a wide range of entry points for using ML, from SQL programmers to data scientists to BI analysts to complete novices. Don’t make the users come to you (learning Python for instance), but go to them and develop tools they can use. </p><p>The term I’ve used for this in a recent blog post is this: don’t make your users change, serve them as you find them. The world of technology adopters is incredibly messy. There are skills gaps, embedded systems (in every sense of the word), monolithic organisations averse to change and any number of other barriers to technology adoption. Some will not be easily overcome. It’s good practice to build a set of products that reflect the weaknesses in the client base.</p><p>In his keynote, CEO Andy Jassy talked a lot about the need for constant reinvention, most notably his own organisation. He spoke about things like having the courage to change, creating a culture of urgency, solving real customer problems and setting top-down goals. All very hard to argue with. The pace of change within AWS points to the fact that his own organisation has clearly embraced his principles on constant reinvention. But most other organisations won’t be so easily transformed. </p><p>Something well illustrated by re:Invent was that AWS is a company with a phenomenally rich and expanding product offering. Just this year’s additions, including AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN, Greengrass 2.0, SageMaker Clarify, HealthLake, Data Wrangler, Monitron and Panorama SDK, and many more. This is an impressive array of capabilities that would be the envy of any other technology provider. </p><p>I wrote a blog post recently in which I said that I thought that AWS would be probably the single most important vendor in the market where AI, IoT and edge computing intersect. I think every other company’s strategy will be defined by AWS. Either in terms of competing with it or in terms of their abilities to harness its capabilities. </p><p>One other notable thing about some of the announcements is that they seem to be about positioning AWS as a trustworthy vendor and different from its competitors. If the announcement of long-term support for FreeRTOS was a sly dig at Google’s short-termism, so too is HealthLake (Google’s equivalent Google Health having been shut down in 2011). The message is: we’re in this for the long haul. </p><p>I’ve really only given you a very simple overview of what I thought of re:Invent. If you want more you’ll need to take a look at the report. Contact me for details on how you can get hold of a copy.</p><p><></p><p>Want to talk about an article I wrote for IoT Now the other day. It relates to diversity in the landscape for IoT connectivity.</p><p>The connectivity landscape for IoT has changed significantly in the last decade. 2G and 3G networks are on their way out, 5G, low power wide area (LPWA) and private networks are on the way in, limitations on permanent roaming and demand for supply chain efficiency led to the arrival of eSIM, network disaggregation, cloud cores and openRAN promises a new generation of connectivity services, edge computing is set to deliver greater functionality for automation applications, and hyperscalers Microsoft and AWS loom large in the consideration of anyone in IoT. The world has changed. </p><p>CSPs have also rapidly evolved their strategies, moving to be much more significant participants in the machine-to-machine, and then IoT, value chains. As highlighted in the recent Transforma Insights ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/csp-iot-peer-benchmarking-2020">Communications Service Provider IoT Peer Benchmarking 2020</a>’ report CSP capabilities span devices, device management, connectivity, applications, data management, systems integration, and many other areas. These are diverse players, with diverse offerings, seeking to address a broad swathe of the IoT opportunity. </p><p>In light of the breadth of offering it is perhaps a little surprising that CSPs haven’t focused more attention on having as broad as possible an offering in their sweet spot, connectivity. </p><p>There is a diverse range of access technologies being used for connecting IoT devices today. In the last few years the technology landscape has pushed back the boundaries of what is possible, offering new options in a number of directions. The higher bandwidth connectivity options of 5G and WiFi 6 open up opportunities for video-based applications and autonomous vehicles. A new generation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites promise to expand the geographical reach of connectivity. It is, however, in the arrival of technologies supporting very low bandwidth applications over wide area networks that promises the greater revolution in connectivity. </p><p>CSPs have a virtual monopoly on cellular technologies and the 5G mMTC LPWA-type technologies. There might be a few instances of new entrants, or private network deployments for NB-IoT, but ostensibly the established Communications Service Providers such as Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Telia, Verizon and Vodafone ‘own’ those markets. This contrasts strongly with the non-mMTC licence-exempt technologies where very few CSPs have a significant play. Orange has been perhaps the most active, with LoRaWAN networks in France, Romania and Slovakia. Elsewhere in Europe KPN has deployed a LoRaWAN network in the Netherlands, Bouygues Telecom (under the Objenious brand) in France, and Proximus in Belgium. Around the world, other existing CSPs that have rolled out LoRa include SK Telecom (South Korea), NTT, Softbank (both Japan), and CAT Telecom (Thailand). </p><p>The licence-exempt non-mMTC technologies today are largely deployed as private networks, which account for well over 90% of devices. However, over time this will change, with public networks supporting over 55% of non-mMTC devices by 2030. In total almost 750 million devices will be connected using public non-mMTC technologies by 2030. A significant opportunity, and one that is directly adjacent to the sweetest of sweet spots for CSPs: rolling out and operating public wide area wireless networks. This is inherently a CSP task, yet surprisingly few have yet pursued it with regard to non-mMTC technologies. After all, the biggest barrier to deployment of such networks is having ready access to sites and infrastructure, and access to an appropriately trained field-support capability, which mobile network operators certainly do. </p><p>It is also worth noting that even private network deployments of licence-exempt technologies shouldn’t necessarily be ruled out for CSPs. They are already making forays into the market for in-building private connectivity through their sale of Mobile Private Network (MPN) services, which has been one of the hottest targets for CSPs in 2020. In that case, they are using cellular technologies, specifically LTE and 5G, to compete with licence-exempt technologies such as WiFi6. For CSPs with a big professional services business, or aspirations to one, being able to support all relevant public and private network technologies that an enterprise customer might need, is clearly an advantage.</p><p>Transforma Insights therefore sees a big opportunity for non-mMTC technologies, and that CSPs are in a good position to pursue those opportunities, predominantly through deploying public networks, but also private as a counterpart to an MPN offering. </p><p>The main argument for CSPs not deploying licence-exempt non-mMTC technologies as public networks is that they already have their own equivalent technologies. Both NB-IoT and LTE-M were, to an extent, developed to counter the competitive threat of Sigfox and later LoRaWAN. However, the implication is that all of these technologies have very similar performance characteristics. That is not the case. Just considering three basic parameters of battery life, price and maximum throughput we can see that they all behave quite differently. LTE-M, for a start, certainly cannot deliver the 10-year battery life that the other technologies can provide; its capabilities will be measured in the months, rather than years. In terms of bandwidth, this can be as low as 1KB/day effective rate for Sigfox versus up to 127kbit/s for NB-IoT. LoRa sits between the two, with a peak speed of 50kbit/s. Turning to device costs, NB-IoT currently costs around USD3-5 per chipset, although with prices coming down. LoRa’s equivalent price is USD1-2. </p><p>With variable performance parameters, it stands to reason that different applications will be more appropriately addressable by different technologies depending on their bandwidth, range or power consumption requirements. Similarly, some applications will benefit from the mesh network capabilities of technologies such as DECT 2020 NR for resiliency/ In the wonderful world of IoT the demands of the various applications diverge significantly, and some are best addressed using each of the technologies. </p><p>Applications with high bandwidth requirements and high power consumption, fall clearly to LTE (and in future 5G) networks. Those with middling requirements are going to be addressable by both existing cellular networks and by the new licensed LPWA networks, LTE-M and NB-IoT, both of which to an extent will fulfil the role that the old 2G/GPRS networks have until now. There is also a range of applications with relatively low bandwidth requirements and low power consumption, which might be addressable by more than one of the LPWA technologies, either licensed or licence-exempt. Smart metering and remote monitoring applications in particular represent a market that could equally well be addressed by licence-exempt technologies, and potentially more cost-effectively given disparities in unit prices. Such a consideration will, of course, depend on the incremental cost of deploying a new network to address them. </p><p>CSPs may take the view that they have an appropriate technology for addressing all of the technologies illustrated in the chart. That is true. However, NB-IoT or LTE-M may not be the optimal technology. They may instead find that LoRaWAN, DECT 2020 NR, or any number of other technologies, offer a cheaper or more easily deployed and scaled alternative. Dogmatic aversion to considering non-cellular technologies is certainly not the optimum approach. </p><p>Communications Service Providers would be well advised to consider all options for deploying networks. The addition of, for instance, LoRaWAN would make a certain element of the IoT opportunity more cost-effectively addressable. This must, of course, be measured against the various other costs of supporting that technology, most notably the cost of deploying and maintaining a network. Every technology is worth at least doing a cost-benefit analysis.</p><p>On a wider note, any CSP which is keen to focus more on being a solution provider for enterprise customers rather than simply a network operator, will want as wide a portfolio of products as possible. This will include both public and private, licensed and licence-exempt technologies.. </p><p><></p><p>One of the things I do every so often for a few magazines is act as a guest interviewer, talking to some technology experts. Last month, for IoT Now, I interviewed Ross Gray, VP Product for Integrated IoT at Sierra Wireless. </p><p>He talked a lot about a how Sierra Wireless is trying to make application deployment as simple as possible, which makes sense in the context of how most IoT adopters need as many helping hands as they can get. They just want to focus on their own competency. It fits very well with what I was talking about in the context of AWS. </p><p>He talked about how the simplification takes a lot of different forms, including easing global deployments, providing quality assurance, maximising coverage, increasing security and ensuring the end-to-end connectivity between the device and the cloud, and also single SIM giving the best quality and coverage for an end-to-end offering. Plus how a single point of contact is very useful if things go wrong..</p><p>Another interesting area was discussion around context and application awareness, particularly for connectivity. That might involve adapting connectivity to the location, type of data (e.g. firmware update vs regular data) and so on. </p><p>It was a pretty far ranging conversation. I recommend you check it out. </p><p>But the thing that set me thinking the most was about the concept of a one-stop-shop. That’s what Sierra claims to be. You can get hardware, connectivity, platform and so on. Yes, that might drive out complexity. But is it really the best for the customer? The idea of an all-in-one device-to-cloud data delivery system is an appealing one. Some of you might have seen the webinar I did with AWS, Eseye and Thales a few months ago. That’s a nice hardware, connectivity and cloud services combo. Also with a lot of moving parts it’s nice to have only one company to go to when things go wrong. And it’s doubtless simpler. But I keep coming back to HiFi separates vs Midi systems. If you know what you’re doing you buy separates (or rather bought, it’s all a bit of a 20th century discussion now), whereas if you don’t, you buy an all in one midi system. Ultimately the best quality is delivered by separates, but whether or not quality matters to you depends on whether you’re listening to Pink Floyd or Baby Shark. </p><p><></p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>Next week I am expecting to unwrap a couple of pieces of interesting news that we’ve been directly involved with here at Transforma Insights. I’ll be able to share more then. </p><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p><div><br /></div>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-35389837888671898512021-01-06T10:26:00.002+00:002021-01-06T10:26:34.028+00:00Wireless Noodle Episode 15: The only constant...<p>This week's Wireless Noodle delves into Mobile Private Networks, Device Management and real-world AI deployments. All three are evolving quickly bringing changing market dynamics, new opportunities and some sticky challenges.</p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/the-only-constant/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>.</p><p>The full transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFl-EDtzLrpKBAn6jW26v1cheor9tnMMGff7gn4LaTruRapEmQ4xQWhfLpJhYT9n_zc89R26QoHMf4qeHysJYHVHH5SQP72QJYIgxEtrkUpmRQ8neFKK_8oFU3E3Y1KIGPSdQrrSjzkTib/s1267/pexels-nothing-ahead-3721597.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="681" data-original-width="1267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFl-EDtzLrpKBAn6jW26v1cheor9tnMMGff7gn4LaTruRapEmQ4xQWhfLpJhYT9n_zc89R26QoHMf4qeHysJYHVHH5SQP72QJYIgxEtrkUpmRQ8neFKK_8oFU3E3Y1KIGPSdQrrSjzkTib/s320/pexels-nothing-ahead-3721597.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. It’s been a little while since the last one, so apologies for that but I thought it was time for a little break. Things got pretty busy at the end of 2020, in a good way. And it’s been lovely taking a break over Christmas and New Year, notwithstanding the Zoom cocktail evening on new years eve which took a while to recover from.</p><p>And it means I have a whole bunch of things to talk with you about in these next few podcast episodes. Today I want to share with you some highlights from a series of reports I wrote recently about mobile private networks. I also want to talk a bit about device management, i.e. making sure that remote devices are secure and working properly and therefore able to support the apps that run on them. </p><p><></p><p>The topic of mobile private networks (MPNs) has been high on the technology agenda during 2020. In particular, it is seen as one of the most immediate opportunities associated with 5G, although 4G MPNs have already been deployed in manufacturing, transportation, energy and many other sectors. The last twelve months has also seen an increasing availability of spectrum that will be useful for MPNs.</p><p>Transforma Insights today published a series of reports looking at the opportunity associated with MPNs. The first, '<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/mobile-private-networks-iot-5G-spectrum">Mobile Private Networks for IoT: 5G capabilities and new dedicated spectrum will drive demand</a>', looks at the reasons why demand for MPNs is rising. These include factors such as the benefits compared to using other alternative technologies, most prominently improvements in reliability and security, the increasing focus from mobile network operators and telecommunications infrastructure vendors, and the recent spectrum allocations, most notably the CBRS auctions in the US, which have created a stimulus to adoption.</p><p>There is a global addressable market for around 42,000 Mobile Private Networks for IoT (excluding agriculture), as discussed in the second report ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/mobile-private-networks-iot-which-sectors-biggest-adoption">Mobile Private Networks for IoT: Which sectors will see the biggest adoption?</a>' and by 2030 Transforma Insights estimates that there will be 150 million cellular IoT devices connected to private networks. The chart below shows Transforma Insights view on which verticals might have the biggest addressable market.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjScct6EozkCwkQgMsB2cIQftdM2kXzA9SHOKwfbwiUzmLHD-L3QGMl2oqnsM4VAp43nfu3DvMqOU6eLYKUPtTBjxPW8a8wJ0se0yuEEQVP8MGL6FMVcJTQoFzArE9Im2_XlYyOeYxfVhKj/s639/2020-12-11+%25283%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="340" data-original-width="639" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjScct6EozkCwkQgMsB2cIQftdM2kXzA9SHOKwfbwiUzmLHD-L3QGMl2oqnsM4VAp43nfu3DvMqOU6eLYKUPtTBjxPW8a8wJ0se0yuEEQVP8MGL6FMVcJTQoFzArE9Im2_XlYyOeYxfVhKj/s320/2020-12-11+%25283%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>One of the main conclusions of the reports is that the maximization of the value delivered by MPNs is dependent on the emergence of a global market. Today there is a lot of variation between countries, particularly in respect of where spectrum is available, and who might hold it. This means that the MPN market is inhibited and more localized than might be optimum. A global market for MPNs will allow for more specialization amongst service providers, for instance focused on specific verticals. More specialization will lead to more innovation in services offered.</p><p>Over time we expect MPN adoption to grow relatively rapidly, and to see more homogeneity in the deployment environment, e.g. with more countries making dedicated private spectrum available. This almost inevitably goes hand-in-hand with growing productization of offerings, while at the same time the contract size will decline. These factors are closely linked, with average price being a key determinant of adoption, and productization being required to reduce price. At the same time, and perhaps counter-intuitively, we also expect that there will be increasing requirements for value-add on top of the pure network offering.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-y0cEuLxLMuj8KHg5m4Y0czmXAtNhrYHxDbC3BVoX-gdlVbHLdUKTyEO5qCo83walbE6aAJNHzMu3a99lb7Ds9HsvlKFrsHiadw23g3abK9gpGJRI4Xy2QKQhw-pkc6p1HpqH-ei71-FV/s629/2020-12-11+%25282%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="325" data-original-width="629" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-y0cEuLxLMuj8KHg5m4Y0czmXAtNhrYHxDbC3BVoX-gdlVbHLdUKTyEO5qCo83walbE6aAJNHzMu3a99lb7Ds9HsvlKFrsHiadw23g3abK9gpGJRI4Xy2QKQhw-pkc6p1HpqH-ei71-FV/s320/2020-12-11+%25282%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>The verticals in which MPNs are adopted have very different requirements, particularly for IoT. What a port needs is very different from a factory, mall or hospital. This means that once the market becomes big enough, ideally globalised, the market will start to fracture, with vendors inevitably layering on vertical-specific capabilities as a way to differentiate.</p><p>The final report in the series, ‘<a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/mobile-private-networks-iot-who-big-winners">Mobile Private Networks for IoT: Who will be the winners</a>?’ examines all of the various participants in providing MPNs and how their internal dynamics and interrelationships are likely to evolve in the next 5-10 years. It proposes Transforma Insights’ view on who will be the likely winners in terms of realizing the benefit from the market.</p><p>Ultimately pure-play Mobile Private Networks as a stand-alone market will not last. The offerings are very useful but they will ultimately need to be subsumed into one of several bigger portfolios of offerings. MNOs will sell MPNs as part of a wider suite of enterprise services, enterprise infrastructure vendors can integrate them quite neatly into a wider networking portfolio, systems integrators will harness them for customized projects covering a broader range of functionality, and an emerging set of specialist service providers will do a similar thing for more vertically-focused productized offerings. Telecoms infrastructure vendors will need to find a way to add additional value to their vanilla MPN offerings.</p><p><></p><p>The changing face of IoT connectivity is driving increased requirements for device management. This article examines three of them: increasing security needs, the rise of LPWA technologies and growing complexity of application implementation.</p><p>The first trend that complicates device management is the increase in security requirements for IoT devices. In a way IoT is a victim of its own success. Just ten years ago there was barely a billion devices that could be described as IoT. Today that figure is around 9 billion, and by the end of 2030 it will have risen to 25 billion. With growing numbers comes an exponential increase in interest from hackers.</p><p>There is also a growing raft of regulations including in Australia, the EU, Japan and the US, relating to IoT security. While most of them are positioned as voluntary, the likelihood is that meeting regulated security requirements will become increasingly important, either because of risk of sanctions against the manufacturer or by virtue of increasing user demand for compliant solutions.</p><p>Security demands also needs to be balanced with the need for products to be user-friendly, profitable and quick to market. Add in the need to maximise battery life in some cases (see below) and you have a very complex set of interrelated demands. Layering on security protocols which will be good for the lifetime of the device will be increasingly challenging.</p><p>The second trend is the growth of Low Power Wide Area devices. The sheer volume of connected devices clearly creates an elevated scale of requirement for device management, but more important are the characteristics of these technologies and the applications they will connect.</p><p>LPWA devices can support only limited downloads, necessitating a rethink of over-the-air device management. There is a lot of variation between the technologies, but all of them share the same principle: to extend battery life by reducing the amount of traffic being sent and received. For Sigfox the effective data transfer capacity is around 1KB per day, making firmware updates nigh on impossible. But even for higher functioning technologies such as NB-IoT and LTE-M there is still a big incentive to reduce the amount of traffic being sent and received so as to maintain long battery life.</p><p>Furthermore, LPWA technologies are overwhelming used for applications where human intervention is unlikely. Most IoT devices today are accessible by a human that can, if necessary, stage a manual intervention to correct the device. Major legacy applications, from fleet management to industrial SCADA systems, are higher value and usually relatively easily accessible. This makes them less painful to have to manually manage than billions of remote environmental sensors which individually don’t justify a truck roll to reset and are almost always in highly distributed and hard-to-reach locations.</p><p>The final trend is slightly more nebulous and relates to the changing nature of application implementation. One aspect of this is the requirement for more efficient provisioning. There is an increasing requirement for applications to be deployed into the field and work without the need for manual intervention. This low- (or zero-) touch provisioning is essential for many IoT applications to be cost-effective. It’s a large part of the reason why there will be significant demand for eSIM – not having to mess around with swapping out physical SIM cards. However, localisation is not simply about SIM cards. It also relates to numerous other functions of the application and the device. Different countries have different regulatory environments relating to data sovereignty, for instance, necessitating different approaches. Also, data delivery (e.g. APNs) needs to be configured. All of these things can be done manually, but IoT applications will increasingly rely on zero-touch provisioning, meaning that efficient OTA device management is a must.</p><p>The other big challenge related to application implementation is edge computing. There has been a noticeably trend in the last few years of more movement of application processing, including quite sophisticated elements such as machine vision, to the edge device. IoT devices are becoming much smarter. To quote Bob Swan, CEO of Intel: “increasingly everything looks like a computer”. There is a lot of truth in that, but unfortunately unlike computers, most IoT devices don’t have a convenient human to reboot them when they go wrong, or implement patches. Putting more smarts on unmanned edge devices creates a greater device management headache.</p><p>This article has covered just a few things that will drive additional device management requirements. Learn more about the changing nature of device management in IoT, and specifically smart cities, by joining the ‘Cellular IoT for Smart City: An Evolving Landscape’ webinar on 19th January at 5pm CET. Matt will join representatives of 1NCE, IoTerop and Itron to discuss the use of cellular technologies for smart cities and the impact of device management and LwM2M in IoT. Register <a href="https://info.ioterop.com/smartcitywebinar">HERE</a>. </p><p><></p><p>During 2020, Transforma Insights has been analysing hundreds of examples of Digital Transformation implementations. Many of the most cutting edge relate to the use of Artificial Intelligence, a subject that continues to attract a huge amount of interest from enterprises. There is a lot of talk about the abstract concept of Artificial Intelligence, but what really matters to businesses is how it can be used in real-life, for instance to streamline business processes or open up new revenue opportunities. This article looks at some of the key learnings from the Transforma Insights analysis of real-world deployments, including the motivations for, best practice in, and experiences of deploying AI in the real-world. </p><p>The first finding is that AI deployments are typically limited to being deployed in relatively mundane applications but are usually strongly embraced where they are used. The top use cases are for customer behaviour analysis, smart customer support and personalised marketing. Other widely adopted applications include recommendation engines, chatbots and repetitive process automation. All of those can be considered to be relatively simple uses for AI. Of the top applications, only risk analysis and workflow optimisation could be considered to be really sophisticated. </p><p>This implies that AI is focusing on relatively low-hanging fruit, an idea that is further supported by looking at the level of risk that we at Transforma Insights perceive from the deployment. We rate only 11% of deployments as having a high level of operational risk. Around half have low risk or are actually being deployed as a way of de-risking operations, i.e. not only do they not themselves present a risk, but they reduce other operational risks to the organisation. </p><p>We get a similar picture when we examine what aspect of the business is affected by the use of AI. Over 85% of implementations have a significant impact on internal process efficiency. Around half that have an impact on the company’s value proposition, i.e. what they sell externally, and less than 20% can be expected to have a truly disruptive impact on the industry in which they are deployed. AI is being fantastically impactful on internal processes, but much less so in other areas of business. The focus on internal cost savings is understandable: any dollars saved come straight off the bottom line, so are inevitably the first focus. </p><p>In contrast with the relatively low degree of sophistication of the use case, the level of autonomy is quite impressive. Almost one-third of deployments are used in order to fully automate a decision-making process, i.e. to remove a human element from a business process. This implies that where it is adopted, AI is being used in a quite aggressive way, fundamentally transforming the process into which it is being adopted. Where adopted AI is not just an add-on, but is fundamentally changing, or replacing, the legacy process. </p><p>AI is also demonstrating a relatively quick time to deploy and pay back. Over 70% take less than one year to deploy, and almost 75% pay back within two years. It’s somewhat inevitable that when enterprises shift to more transformational uses of AI that the deployment and payback times will be longer. Nevertheless, those short time-frames bode well for future use.</p><p>Another positive indicator of future widespread adoption is the degree to which deployments are based on productised solutions. Over 70% of AI implementations are based on fully productised solutions, and less than 10% are one-offs. Replicability is going to be a key factor for the widespread use of AI. At Transforma Insights we expect the requirement for customisation to increase substantially the more sophisticated the use case. Nevertheless, it is starting from a very high base line of productization and therefore replicability. </p><p>AI as it’s deployed today is also surprisingly lacking in complexity in terms of key deployment parameters. Transforma Insights looks at three areas of complexity: functional (i.e. how complex the project is), stakeholder (i.e. the number of internal an external stakeholders in a project) and geographical scale (i.e. how many countries is it deployed in). Perhaps unsurprisingly AI projects are amongst the most functionally complex that we look at. There is little doubting that AI in all its incarnations, no matter how mundane, is cutting edge stuff. However, stakeholder and geographical complexity rate relatively low. Some of the barriers to deploying other technologies often don’t manifest themselves with regard to rolling out AI. At least not for current deployments. </p><p>The message from examining real-world AI deployments is fairly clear. Today we have barely scratched the surface of the possible enterprise applications. The early adoption is understandably happening in those use cases that represent quick wins for the enterprise deploying them. As such it’s no different from the adoption of more or less any other new technology you choose to name. Quick wins tend to involve internal efficiency savings as they have the most immediate impact on the organisation. They also tend to be the easiest projects to implement because of a lack of internal barriers; saving money tends not to need a lot of approvals or necessitate a fundamental transformation in how the company runs. Once you move out of cutting costs and into changing products, the number of interested stakeholders tends to grow exponentially. At that point the complexity levels rise and the time to deploy gets longer. As is the case with the adoption of almost all new technologies, it is the internal process, business model, system and culture changes that are the real challenge. AI is poised to move into this space and anyone serious about adopting it will need to look very carefully first at whether it has made the necessary internal process changes to do so. </p><p><></p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated </p><p>Next week I want to talk a bit about Amazon’s re:Invent virtual event which I tuned in for during December. I will also cover the topic of using different technologies for connecting IoT devices, and a summary of an interview I did with an exec from Sierra Wireless recently. </p><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p><div><br /></div>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-58642825796999889332020-11-25T10:12:00.000+00:002020-11-25T10:12:10.551+00:00Wireless Noodle Episode 14: Replicate for Victory!<p>In this week's episode Matt looks at the approaches taken by technology services companies such as Accenture and IBM to replicating projects, the efficiency savings this brings, and how it represents the key to unlocking huge amounts of market value. He also digs into some Transforma Insights research on how Artificial Intelligence is being deployed in the real world today and what lessons that gives us for the future. </p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/replicate-for-victory/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>.</p><p>The full transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhczZZ6ve1QzQWE4DqlI8FzEsB3-2-xsNZREmv6qK-1-hFrdwZgUnNJMECrarQRCaIF-kZi5gmi5dnc0hT10rNwr3F1ujUQRvlT3eZHgs3Qwsav_b1Xd-KUhJWSE7cIjk5txD8i682kEkq4/s637/pexels-andrea-piacquadio-3831873.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="637" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhczZZ6ve1QzQWE4DqlI8FzEsB3-2-xsNZREmv6qK-1-hFrdwZgUnNJMECrarQRCaIF-kZi5gmi5dnc0hT10rNwr3F1ujUQRvlT3eZHgs3Qwsav_b1Xd-KUhJWSE7cIjk5txD8i682kEkq4/s320/pexels-andrea-piacquadio-3831873.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. I’ve spoken a lot about IoT the last couple of episodes, so I’m going to give that a rest this time, although there’s a very interesting blog post I wrote about <a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/shrinking-growth-shifting-dynamics-cisco-ericsson-connectivity-support-platform">connectivity platforms for IoT</a> based on a recent report, so I recommend having a look at that. But no, this week I want to delve into some work that we’ve been doing at Transforma Insight on real-world AI deployment. And before that I want to talk a little bit about vendors, specialisation and replicability of solutions. </p><p><></p><p>One of the main things we do at Transforma Insights is to look at the vendor landscape, i.e. who is good at delivering particular products and services to customers (almost always enterprise customers). In some cases we’re assessing the capabilities of a set of products, as with our recent reports on Communications Service Providers or Application Enablement Platforms in IoT. I said I wouldn’t talk IoT this episode didn’t I? So much for that. In other cases we’re looking at the companies that provide professional services and systems integration. The likes of IBM, Accenture, T-Systems, Tech Mahindra and many more. The interesting thing about these types of companies is that they cut across most of the technology areas that we cover. IoT (did it again), AI, blockchain and so on. </p><p>For these professional services companies it’s generally not about selling products, but about selling consulting hours. Which is what I’m interested in. In particular in unpicking the market landscape. Who’s best at doing what. With products it’s comparatively easy, but with these types of services companies it’s harder to pin down who is good at what. </p><p>Obviously some of them have particular technical capabilities which differentiate them. T-Systems is good at networking, for instance, IBM is hot on AI. What is perhaps more interesting is the extent that they are better or worse at addressing particular verticals. The key thing is that there SHOULD be some variation there. There should be efficiency savings from taking one solution delivered for one company and doing more or less the same thing for someone else. That efficiency saving of only having to customise, say, 50% of a project is huge. Whichever company establishes early dominance should be able to continue to build on it until it is unassailably more efficient at developing, say, AI solutions for retail. That’s assuming they’re good at replicating solutions. Some are, some aren’t, in my experience. Those that aren’t seem to have the mistaken belief that it’s better for a project to take longer and be more expensive because that’s more billable hours and more revenue. Pretty short-sighted.</p><p>So, technology services companies should become increasingly vertically specialised the more they win projects. But can a company do something to short-cut that. The answer is yes, of course. They can buy into a particular vertical by accepting less revenue on a few projects until the capability is established. Or they could acquire the relevant capabilities.</p><p>What’s most important to the success of any given services company is that it recognises that replicating solutions from one client to another is essential, and it implements a robust system for doing it. </p><p>This is a rich seam of research, understanding this service provider landscape, particularly as they cut so much across all of technology areas that we look at at Transforma Insights. We will publish more reports on this in the near future. </p><p><></p><p>During 2020, Transforma Insights has been analysing hundreds of examples of Digital Transformation implementations. Many of the most cutting edge relate to the use of Artificial Intelligence, a subject that continues to attract a huge amount of interest from enterprises. There is a lot of talk about the abstract concept of Artificial Intelligence, but what really matters to businesses is how it can be used in real-life, for instance to streamline business processes or open up new revenue opportunities. This article looks at some of the key learnings from the Transforma Insights analysis of real-world deployments, including the motivations for, best practice in, and experiences of deploying AI in the real-world. </p><p>The first finding is that AI deployments are typically limited to being deployed in relatively mundane applications but are usually strongly embraced where they are used. The top use cases are for customer behaviour analysis, smart customer support and personalised marketing. Other widely adopted applications include recommendation engines, chatbots and repetitive process automation. All of those can be considered to be relatively simple uses for AI. Of the top applications, only risk analysis and workflow optimisation could be considered to be really sophisticated. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMAPYrnVS-9noUC04FUlSpJQ5O7Fcr9REPqURG4w3qMrHO6gRHwXcF7I5JJ9G5HlWKNlHbZz7nMZh0iXdaGms9q1XGc-kE9f0F4NxDVnco1wQXL4JUjenEAPOtqLsjp47dizz3zuitBYcK/s884/AI+article+Nov20+Image+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="702" data-original-width="884" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMAPYrnVS-9noUC04FUlSpJQ5O7Fcr9REPqURG4w3qMrHO6gRHwXcF7I5JJ9G5HlWKNlHbZz7nMZh0iXdaGms9q1XGc-kE9f0F4NxDVnco1wQXL4JUjenEAPOtqLsjp47dizz3zuitBYcK/s320/AI+article+Nov20+Image+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>This implies that AI is focusing on relatively low-hanging fruit, an idea that is further supported by looking at the level of risk that we at Transforma Insights perceive from the deployment. We rate only 11% of deployments as having a high level of operational risk. Around half have low risk or are actually being deployed as a way of de-risking operations, i.e. not only do they not themselves present a risk, but they reduce other operational risks to the organisation. </p><p>We get a similar picture when we examine what aspect of the business is affected by the use of AI. Over 85% of implementations have a significant impact on internal process efficiency. Around half that have an impact on the company’s value proposition, i.e. what they sell externally, and less than 20% can be expected to have a truly disruptive impact on the industry in which they are deployed. AI is being fantastically impactful on internal processes, but much less so in other areas of business. The focus on internal cost savings is understandable: any dollars saved come straight off the bottom line, so are inevitably the first focus. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj11ozj7u3IKJn-oEIaBczQEivH37M9WnTYtpETzMSWDaVzZe0EL5eIWWDpPZDxL0syi2mzfFR62UuttUAxd-2GzJzcXumE3ra6fym6-z1HMp7W37gkxbSbldBV-sBG6Qz2KQmzGLRWTOQS/s881/AI+article+Nov20+Image+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="881" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj11ozj7u3IKJn-oEIaBczQEivH37M9WnTYtpETzMSWDaVzZe0EL5eIWWDpPZDxL0syi2mzfFR62UuttUAxd-2GzJzcXumE3ra6fym6-z1HMp7W37gkxbSbldBV-sBG6Qz2KQmzGLRWTOQS/s320/AI+article+Nov20+Image+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>In contrast with the relatively low degree of sophistication of the use case, the level of autonomy is quite impressive. Almost one-third of deployments are used in order to fully automate a decision-making process, i.e. to remove a human element from a business process. This implies that where it is adopted, AI is being used in a quite aggressive way, fundamentally transforming the process into which it is being adopted. Where adopted AI is not just an add-on, but is fundamentally changing, or replacing, the legacy process. </p><p>AI is also demonstrating a relatively quick time to deploy and pay back. Over 70% take less than one year to deploy, and almost 75% pay back within two years. It’s somewhat inevitable that when enterprises shift to more transformational uses of AI that the deployment and payback times will be longer. Nevertheless, those short time-frames bode well for future use.</p><p>Another positive indicator of future widespread adoption is the degree to which deployments are based on productised solutions. Over 70% of AI implementations are based on fully productised solutions, and less than 10% are one-offs. Replicability is going to be a key factor for the widespread use of AI. At Transforma Insights we expect the requirement for customisation to increase substantially the more sophisticated the use case. Nevertheless, it is starting from a very high base line of productization and therefore replicability. </p><p>AI as it’s deployed today is also surprisingly lacking in complexity in terms of key deployment parameters. Transforma Insights looks at three areas of complexity: functional (i.e. how complex the project is), stakeholder (i.e. the number of internal an external stakeholders in a project) and geographical scale (i.e. how many countries is it deployed in). Perhaps unsurprisingly AI projects are amongst the most functionally complex that we look at. There is little doubting that AI in all its incarnations, no matter how mundane, is cutting edge stuff. However, stakeholder and geographical complexity rate relatively low. Some of the barriers to deploying other technologies often don’t manifest themselves with regard to rolling out AI. At least not for current deployments. </p><p>The message from examining real-world AI deployments is fairly clear. Today we have barely scratched the surface of the possible enterprise applications. The early adoption is understandably happening in those use cases that represent quick wins for the enterprise deploying them. As such it’s no different from the adoption of more or less any other new technology you choose to name. Quick wins tend to involve internal efficiency savings as they have the most immediate impact on the organisation. They also tend to be the easiest projects to implement because of a lack of internal barriers; saving money tends not to need a lot of approvals or necessitate a fundamental transformation in how the company runs. Once you move out of cutting costs and into changing products, the number of interested stakeholders tends to grow exponentially. At that point the complexity levels rise and the time to deploy gets longer. As is the case with the adoption of almost all new technologies, it is the internal process, business model, system and culture changes that are the real challenge. (Link to blogpost looking at this topic: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/eight-internal-factors-iot-digital-transformation">The 7 internal factors you need to consider to take advantage of IoT and other Digital Transformation technologies</a>, link to previous podcast on the topic: <a href="https://www.wirelessnoodle.com/2020/08/wireless-noodle-episode-1-internet-of.html">Wireless Noodle Episode 1: The Internet of Things Myth</a>. AI is poised to move into this space and anyone serious about adopting it will need to look very carefully first at whether it has made the necessary internal process changes to do so. </p><p><></p><p>Just a reminder: if you’re enjoying the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated </p><p>Next week I want to talk a bit about Mobile Private Networks, and I should have completed a report about how it’s better to buy specialist capabilities rather than building your own and I’ll aim to share something of that too. </p><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-45888765220359721202020-11-11T16:10:00.002+00:002020-11-11T16:10:27.751+00:00Wireless Noodle Episode 13: The Wisdom of Crowds<p>Matt digs into the 2020 version of the Eclipse IoT survey and finds a lot of interesting data, including the rise of the hyperscalers, the growing importance of connected agriculture, fears over connectivity, trends in OS, protocols and edge compute, and something related to Tex-Mex food. There’s also time to delve into the recent Transforma Insight report on IoT Application Enablement Platforms as well as a bit of a follow up to the IBM discussion from a few weeks ago. </p><p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/the-wisdom-of-crowds/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>.</p><p>The full transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG8sfe3wnLXPr7QXrrqxWPmBEEU9SwdgldXYmU-d0o6nUeLJVNEghn78T8ajX7NEzEJyN7r3WYKtJHyKWyGt7gA8GbQI0Bv4GIr4VJxQcjauzDsyyEfPDk5XLSb3YsoGEZQdNDr-zNhw2r/s640/pexels-wendy-wei-3633307.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="426" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG8sfe3wnLXPr7QXrrqxWPmBEEU9SwdgldXYmU-d0o6nUeLJVNEghn78T8ajX7NEzEJyN7r3WYKtJHyKWyGt7gA8GbQI0Bv4GIr4VJxQcjauzDsyyEfPDk5XLSb3YsoGEZQdNDr-zNhw2r/s320/pexels-wendy-wei-3633307.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><></p><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle. It’s a short one this week. I’m delving into the recently released Eclipse IoT Developer’s survey. Always a fascinating read. But, as I discover, the wisdom of crowds rather depends on the crowd. And I have a plug for a report and a couple of webinars.</p><p><></p><p>The Eclipse Foundation is a community aimed at encouraging adoption of open source software. Every year they run a survey looking at trends in IoT adoption. You can find out more about them and their Eclipse IoT Working Group at <a href="http://IoT.eclipse.org">IoT.eclipse.org</a>. Obviously the respondents are a little bit skewed towards those that prefer open source solutions, but nevertheless the survey provides some interesting insights. Here’s my take on the findings, but I do recommend you download and take a look at the findings.</p><p>The first finding related to vertical sector. Of all the various areas in which IoT is deployed, agriculture emerged as the #1. Now, it wasn’t by much, and I suspect it’s not a statistically significant finding as there are quite a few verticals with similar levels of focus, but it was certainly up substantially compared with last year. One of the findings that we highlighted on the Transforma Insights webinar on 2nd November was the growth of mobile private networks. Lots of people are using that as the way to generate revenue from 5G. Certainly it’s flavour of the month. And which would prove to be the #1 vertical in private networks over the next 10 years? Agriculture. Our expectation was that it would take a while to materialise but it’s certainly a strong opportunity. There is also a Covid 19 element to this. Let’s face it there’s a Covid element to everything at the moment. But automation to cope with shortage of workers or distancing is clearly a consideration, as it is in manufacturing. Although interestingly industrial automation is only up a little year-on-year. There are some who would have you believe that IoT is all about industrial. In terms of value it’s tremendously important, but in terms of volume it’s really not that great. Check out the <a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/transforma-insights-webinar-forecast-iot-2030-replay">Transforma Insights free webinar from the 2nd November</a> for more details. Link on the Wireless Noodle website.</p><p>The other vertical which is perhaps underrepresented, and declining, is connected home. Still a bit of a mess that sector with bad behaviour on the part of hardware developers across the board, bricking products and generally doing what I refer to in my book The Internet of Things Myth as applying software practices to the hardware world, when it comes to product end of life, or words to that effect.</p><p>Next up is Operating System. Open source tops the polls, with Linux and FreeRTOS. Probably a reasonable reflection of reality albeit a bit heavy given Eclipse respondents will likely be a bit more keep on open source than most. In fact one of the questions was about using open source, and 2/3 of respondents said they did. Not sure that’s exactly representative.</p><p>What’s interesting though is that Windows is up from 20% adoption to 31%. I’m sure that includes Azure IoT Edge, Azure Sphere, Windows Embedded, IoT Plug and Play and so on. The key thing is the extent to which Microsoft has been successful at getting into the edge device, which is all part of its strategy for expanding on its cloud services position to what we call ‘cloud-to-edge’. </p><p>There are a few more questions about edge, including what are the top edge computing workloads. Very surprisingly AI pips ‘Control Logic’ by 30% to 29%. If find that almost impossible to believe. Control Logic is surely THE edge workload. But maybe lots of the things we’d naturally think of in that category is being AI washed.</p><p>There are also the usual questions about biggest concerns. Security comes top, as usual. But a surprise at #2, and up quite considerably, is connectivity. In fact it looks like most of the concerns are up. Could be that Covid has generally added to everyone’s anxiety levels. But the uptick in concerns about connectivity is noticeable. It could be the issue I’ve written about and spoken about extensively. Connectivity has become more complex in the last couple of years. 10 years ago you stuck a SIM in a 2G modem and it would work anywhere in the world. In the interim, we’ve had 2G and 3G switch off, with more to come, 4G roll out, 5G just starting to arrive, new LPWA techs, both licensed and unlicensed. Navigating that little lot to work out what technology will be future proofed enough to support your connected widget in 20 countries for the next 5 years, or 10 years or 20 years, but at the same time without busting you will a huge additional bill of materials cost, must be exhausting. </p><p>The survey report rather hopefully assesses the growing importance of ‘performance’ as being an indication of the market getting past PoCs and into optimisation. Could be.</p><p>There are no surprises in the programming language category. C, C++, Java, Python and Java Script dominate. C a bit more on IoT constrained devices. Java more for everything else. And I’ve not much to say about HTTP, MQTT and TCP/IP being the highest ranked communication protocols. </p><p>Connectivity makes for interesting reading though. In the forecasts we do at Transforma Insights we estimate that around 70% of connections use short range technologies. And the assumption is that the vast majority of that is WiFi. The survey asked which protocols the developers used. WiFi did come top, with 44% of respondents using it. That seems very low. 39% use Ethernet, which seems quite high. But I guess for professional developers, there’s still a healthy requirement for using Ethernet for gateways and so forth. Cellular techs and Bluetooth are level on 37%. So, while cellular connectivity is only 10% of connections, a much larger proportion of developers need to make use. Again, intuitive. It’s part of the reason we urge caution about even our forecasts. Number of devices doesn’t necessarily reflect the importance of the tech, or likelihood that it will need to be used in any given implementation. </p><p>Other interesting findings were that use of distributed ledger is up a lot, from 14% of respondents in 2019 to 22% in 2020. Use of MySQL is down from 40% to 31%. </p><p>And the cloud vendors really dominate the middleware platform space, with AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure IoT and Google Cloud IoT Platform all scoring high. But in public public cloud itself, AWS leads the pack, being used by 40% of developers. Azure’s second with 31% and Google Cloud third with 26%. The headline though is that they’re all up between 6 and 8 percentage points year on year. Competence in cloud integration is clearly becoming more important. And it’s also obviously more important for the cloud vendors to be playing in the IoT middleware space so as to own that part of cloud-to-edge.</p><p>You can debate the statistical significance of all these numbers until you’re blue in the face. Half the respondents work for organisations with fewer than 100 employees, almost half have only been developers for 2 years, only 20% are based in North America, etc. And the respondents base is quite self-selecting. </p><p>I’m reminded of a story I once heard about someone in Mexico using Trip Advisor or something similar to track down a great restaurant. The place they found had glowing 5 star reviews, but the food was atrocious Tex-Mex rubbish. And they looked around them and saw that the crowd was all coach tours from over the border. The wisdom of crowds depends very much on the crowd. </p><p>But this survey certainly holds a mirror up to the IoT world. And the message is this: the hyperscalers are here, and you can’t ignore them. </p><p><></p><p>A quick follow up to the IBM section from a few weeks ago. I’ve since <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/prognosis-ibm-rolls-dice-strategic-pivot">written a report about the likely prognosis for the company</a> which you can get a copy of as a subscriber to Transforma Insights’ services. Quick summary is that it should work out well, but only if the new entity can maintain strong ties with Newco.</p><p>A couple of other things to shout about. We ran a webinar looking at the future of IoT over the next decade. Well worth a look. I’ll put a link on the website: <a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/transforma-insights-webinar-forecast-iot-2030-replay">Webinar: Forecasting the IoT Market Opportunity, 2019-2030</a>.</p><p>And speaking of webinars, I also did one with the good folks of IoT Now, Eseye, AWS and Thales on simplifying IoT. You can also check that one out on catch-up.</p><p>Another big shout, and I mean big, for our <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/iot-aep-report-reveals-diversity-of-marketplace">latest Transforma Insights report, looking at IoT platforms</a>. It weighs in at over 100 pages and looks at the likes of AWS, Fujitsu, Microsoft, Oracle and Siemens. Well worth a look. Press release came out on the 11th November, and there will doubtless be blog posts on the Transforma Insights website over the next few weeks. Without spoiling the thunder of Jim, the author, the main finding was that there isn’t an single ‘best’ IoT platform. They all do different things, frequently with particular vertical capabilities, or some other attribute that will make them great for one buyer but not so much for another. One of the key things in the report was picking apart who would be best in what scenario. Invaluable stuff for a would-be buyer. </p><p><></p><p>I was delighted after last week’s episode that when I tuned into Telefonica’s Industry Analyst event that almost the first thing that their CEO Javier Pallete talked about was humanising technology. Just what I was talking about last week. </p><p>A request: if you’ve enjoyed the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated </p><p>I’ve no idea what I’ll be covering next week. You’ll just have to tune in to find out. </p><p><br /></p><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-28667614008102690702020-11-04T09:33:00.001+00:002020-11-04T09:33:20.284+00:00Wireless Noodle Episode 12: The Humans Are Coming!<p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/the-humans-are-coming/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>.</p><p>The full transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2tDfZVThtR-zKdyl7eboTNnYjFTUkn5R2jOPs90aZ9tDCOyMKc4Xi_JC1_qt5NAgCml9Ic6b3hrkq1jaJj3gMpfG8mhXao_Rb_evzD3nyePq04X7_hfqhCx_SB0i3uNLhwiXECTJO1gWh/s640/pexels-alena-koval-886521+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="411" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2tDfZVThtR-zKdyl7eboTNnYjFTUkn5R2jOPs90aZ9tDCOyMKc4Xi_JC1_qt5NAgCml9Ic6b3hrkq1jaJj3gMpfG8mhXao_Rb_evzD3nyePq04X7_hfqhCx_SB0i3uNLhwiXECTJO1gWh/s320/pexels-alena-koval-886521+%25281%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle I want to talk this week about a couple of things. I promised a summary of the discussions on my panels at the Total Telecom Congress, and I also want to talk about sustainability. I know it gets trotted out as a corporate social responsibility topic every so often, related to environmental impact. But I want to dig deeper. Also, a new technology company that caught my eye, Stream Analyze, which does data stream analysis. The interesting unifying theme that cuts across this week is the extent to which there’s a bit of a rebound to reintroducing the humanity into technology. </p><p><></p><p>The good folks at Total Telecom have been tracking the tech sector for decades and I was delighted to chair a couple of roundtables during their <a href="https://www.terrapinn.com/conference/total-telecom-congress/agenda.stm">online Total Telecom Congress event </a>which was held last week. And I was a judge for the <a href="https://www.terrapinn.com/awards/world-communication-awards/index.stm">World Communications Awards</a>. Switching panels to be virtual works pretty well, but I have to say I missed the flying champagne corks and getting dressed up in my tux for the awards dinner. But I digress.</p><p>Panel 1 looked at the $6tn opportunity for telcos in IoT. The telco opportunity in IoT is something I’ve spoken about A LOT on this podcast. To the point where I should probably give it a rest for a bit! But the fact that I’ve been watching this space for a long time is part of the reason why they asked me to get involved. Also, I should note that I’ve no idea where the figure of $6tn came from. Our forecasts, which we ran our own <a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/transforma-insights-webinar-forecast-iot-2030-replay">webinar on the other week has a prediction of all of IoT being worth just a little over $1tn in 2030</a>. I guess it could be cumulative over a long period. Either way, the amounts are staggering, so well worth digging into the opportunity.</p><p>I was joined on the panel by representatives of O2 Czech Republic, Verizon, Jio Platforms and Telia as operators, and also Emeldi which is an operational support system vendor. </p><p>I kicked things off by talking about how the operator market for IoT had grown from 100m devices to 1 billion over the last decade and was <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/iot-generation-shift-2020s-5g-connections-2G3G">due to grow to 5.4 billion by 2030</a>. But at the same time, and equally importantly, it wasn’t any more a case of CSPs simply piggybacking on existing infrastructure. They’ve had to make actual investments in new technologies like NB-IoT or in software platforms. And that’s not to mention strategic forays into building services for end users, or buying companies that already provide those services. I described how IoT, as related to the telecoms industry, has grown up. There is more at stake now than in the past when it provided a nice additional stream of free revenue. Investments need to be made, and RoI is critical. And I managed to do all of that in the space of less than 2 minutes. Brevity is the soul of analysis. </p><p>I don’t want to paraphrase the whole panel. More interesting is to pick out some of the interesting ideas that dominated.</p><p>The first is that operators (and this could apply to anyone) need to find differentiators beyond the vertical. Horizontal differentiators. One that we explored was private networks which were universally seen as being strong opportunities. Another was around optimising networks, such as NB-IoT. </p><p>Of course there are strong positions focused on verticals, but there was agreement that this is typically hard earned. For instance, both Telia and Verizon had to acquire companies to build capabilities in transportation and fleet management respectively.</p><p>The second was about catalysing the ecosystem of vendors. Now, I’ve heard a million times about IoT marketplaces. But it seems like we’re actually really now getting to a point where there may be a single player able to bring together all the constituent pieces. And that may be the operators. But it also brings me on to the third main topic.</p><p>The third big topic related to hyperscalers. They may, alternatively be the big aggregators of IoT, pulling together hardware, software and services. And lots of operators are building relationships with the likes of AWS and Microsoft, which may well define their strategies in the market for the foreseeable future.</p><p>In the second panel we dug into the concept of the smart city or the ‘city of the future’, which is one which has been with us for a long time. Exactly what it looks like depends a lot on what perspective you have. A former colleague of mine used to equate it to the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz. In the book it wasn’t actually emerald, it just appeared that way because everyone wore green glasses.</p><p>It incorporates ideas of digital inclusion, automation, e-government, public services and so on. We might also fold in electrification, autonomous driving, and many other key technology trends.</p><p>And we can’t escape the fact that in many places more attention has been focused on the role of cities in the wake of the current pandemic. Many of these topics have been disrupted, accelerated, changed or in some way affected by the impact of COVID-19 this year. </p><p>In the panel I was joined by representatives from the City of Stockholm, Digital Greenwich and Rogers Communications, which has been doing a lot in addressing smart city opportunities in Canada.</p><p>One key topics here was citizen engagement and inclusion. Not least by taking advantage of the great opportunities the cellphone presents to engage with users. One example quoted was having a single platform for reporting potholes, so that people could see what had been reported and therefore not phone in again. Better service, more engaging, less resource intensive.</p><p>This brought out what I thought was the most interesting finding of the panel. That for years smart cities activities had been technology-led, top down. But when you switch things around and think in terms of citizen engagement it naturally follows that the use cases and implementation is much more bottom up. You still run into challenges with fragmented layers of government creating friction, but it’s still a much more effective approach. </p><p>The other significant talking point was around co-innovation. This is no longer about having technology solutions which are lifted and shifted into any given city. It’s much more about vendors providing cocreation and incubator capabilities to allow for the discovery of solutions.</p><p>One particularly thing from Stockholm related to creating virtual environments for elderly residents and others less able to get out and about, for instance at a recreated version of a big stadium in the city. This is one way to make VR/AR about more than just gamers. It’s also interesting a way of using COVID to explore new ways of innovating. </p><p><></p><p>Item #2 on the agenda for today’s podcast is another interesting technology company that I’ve spoken to recently. In this case it’s <a href="https://streamanalyze.com/">Stream Analyze</a>. It’s a platform for real-time data analytics. Interestingly it can also work as a client on an edge device with only very limited CPU and memory (100KB of RAM is typically all you need. The approach is highly interactive allowing the developer to build data analysis models directly onto the device, thus taking account of the peculiarities of that device. The tech is very impressive to look at.</p><p>What I was really taken with, though, was the extent to which it is designed bottom up to integrate with company systems. I’ll give an example. You could build a financial model in excel and then push it to the machine to, for instance, push the wear and tear costs into a balance sheet. The other thing I absolutely loved was when they talk about the tech they couch it in exactly the right terms, for instance talking to product managers about the product lifecycle and how it can help through that. A refreshing approach, compared to how a lot of technology is sold.</p><p>I also wanted to talk about a couple of news items that I noticed this week, but only briefly. </p><p>Digital India has adopted the <a href="https://www.onem2m.org/">OneM2M</a> standard. If you’re not familiar, OneM2M is a standards body that has developed standard interfaces for the IoT. Now to me that always seemed like a herculean task given the sheer scale of IoT. But it seems to have had more success in smart cities than elsewhere. I suspect because there’s more of a need there for a portable and objectively ‘safe’ option for public investment. </p><p>The other two items were <a href="https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2020-press/akamai-advances-5g-security-strategy-with-acquisition-of-asavie.jsp">Asavie being bought by Akamai</a>. Asavie is an old friend of the Transforma Insights team who we know well. Essentially it does software defined private networks for mobile devices. Really useful for IoT, but not just IoT. Very focused on highly secure connectivity. Akamai makes for a very sensible home, focused as it is on content delivery. Funnily enough Akamai was the company I did probably my first consulting project for back in perhaps 2000, focused on content delivery networks. It seems to have gone from strength to strength over the years and now serves around 1/5th of all web traffic. Given how much is going mobile it seems a sensible tie up. </p><p>The other is slightly more unusual. It’s <a href="https://brightwolf.com/">Bright Wolf </a>(an industrial IoT platform) being bought by systems integrator and consulting firm Cognizant. Bright Wolf is a highly specialised company with some top class industrial IoT architects. And with a good roster of clients. For instance it has been working with companies like Caterpillar, which is a pretty good marker. I think it’s the consulting and know-how that is more of the attraction, than the platform itself. That suits Cognizant’s business model. </p><p>As highlighted in a <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/procuring-iot-aeps-vendor-competency-technical-capability">recent report put out by Transforma Insights</a>, when picking an IoT platform it’s usually more about the skills and the fit than about the technical capabilities. </p><p><></p><p>For my final topic this week I want to talk a bit about technology and sustainability. The ICT sector is never really thought of as a major energy consumer, but it is increasingly important. Some forecasts predict that by 2030 up to 50% of global energy consumption will be by ICT. So we need to think about the impact of some of the technology areas that we focus on. </p><p>Blockchain (or Distributed Ledger more broadly) is an obvious culprit. Bitcoin alone today generates 0.21% of world energy supply, by virtue of bitcoin mining. That puts it between Switzerland and Czech Republic as the equivalent energy use (and carbon footprint) as a medium-sized country. A single transaction is the equivalent to over 25 days of energy use of a single household. And equivalent to almost 800,000 equivalent transactions as Visa. When you look to the concept of sustainability, bitcoin is by definition unsustainable. There were 300,000 bitcoin transactions in Q2 2020 compared to 50 billion by Visa. Bitcoin wouldn’t need to take a large proportion of Visa’s market share in order to dwarf the energy consumption of everything else on the rest of the planet. </p><p>Then I think of AI. The energy cost of training and deploying an AI is substantial. A topic for further investigation for me there. And there must, of course, be diminishing returns. At some point the value derived will well exceed the benefit. For instance, what kind of resources had to be ploughed into making Deep Blue a comparable chess player to Garry Kasparov. </p><p>Garry Kasparov is Russian and was born in 1963 and was beaten by Deep Blue in 1997. Over the period 1963-1996 (inclusive) the average Russian produced 449.8 tonnes of CO2. If we assume that to hone his skills as a chess player Garry generated a lot more, perhaps we can round up to 1,000 tonnes. What was the collective cost of the people, processing and so on that created Deep Blue. You can bet that it was considerably more than 1,000 tonnes. </p><p>AI may be good. But humans are more efficient. Not in cost terms perhaps, but certainly in energy terms. There will be many use cases where the trade off is necessary. If AI is significantly better at spotting cancer on scans, great. But does it pay to use it to tell if someone has selected a can of Coke vs Pepsi in a store? Maybe, maybe not. But I don’t see us having those conversations much yet. It will come. </p><p>The final one is IoT. This is, if anything, a carbon sink. The tech industry’s way of balancing the scales. Of course there’s some IoT which uses more power. Most consumer apps, for instance. But offset that against all the energy saving applications, or pre-emptive maintenance or more efficient asset utilisation. Smart metering for instance. Or just smart grid infrastructure. Both of those are responsible for better load balancing, reducing losses and so forth. The phrase ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ could be well applied to the IoT; identifying a potential problem and solving it before it becomes costly, for instance requiring the replacement of a piece of equipment rather than just a simple component. And it’s not just about energy. Other scarce resources too. Much of precision agriculture is predicated on more efficiently using water resources. In California’s central valley there is a massive water shortage and the aquifers have been increasingly emptied. In part this is because they’re growing very water intensive crops. A single almond requires 5 litres of water. If you can farm more precisely, you can perhaps reduce that, or at least keep water use to just the 5 litres rather than 10 or 20. </p><p>IoT tips the scales back in the direction of sustainability. </p><p>Sustainability is a fascinating topic and one that I’ll come back to again. Im particularly interested in the macro level stuff around the total volume of innovation, the bearing capacity of the earth and our ability to continue as a species. But I’ll come back to that next week I think.</p><p><></p><p>I mentioned at the start about how the unifying theme was about reintroducing the humanity into technology. In smart cities my panellists were very keen to reinforce that it’s by starting with citizen engagement that you make the most successful use of technology. Similarly Stream Analyze’s approach is refreshing because it puts the human process front and center in the adoption of technology. It absolutely makes sense to do that. And the question of sustainability is all about making sure that we’re still around to enjoy the benefits of all this tech. The humans are coming!</p><p>A small plug for this week. I spoke with Mark Thirman of the MIT Enterprise Forum for his fireside chat. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-5WqtJiu_o&feature=youtu.be">It’s available on YouTube</a>. I recommend taking a look. </p><p>A request: if you’ve enjoyed the podcast I’d be obliged if you could leave a review. It’s much appreciated. </p><p>Next week I’ll be covering that next week as well as a mix of technology news and insight on some new tech that I’ve seen recently. And I particularly wanted to take a look at the annual Eclipse Foundation IoT survey, which always makes for interesting reading. </p><p>I hope you can join me. </p><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-12820442405154407122020-10-27T08:30:00.006+00:002020-10-28T12:35:56.363+00:00Wireless Noodle Episode 11: IBM splits, IoT grows<p>You can access the podcast <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/ibm-splits-iot-grows/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>.</p><p>The full transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGz2V4TCQsQZcm_dW6g0BiqnEGlVU9_i-OntHJ0C4kAA6sECFg4dGSMwLarnFeJ8SIy39OeEWF6yHw9ucj-guII40Nf83Za0L_6R6pAy13GLagZ4cR7QYNf96VaeRD3wy5YOVVpu_QYokg/s2048/pexels-akil-mazumder-1072824.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGz2V4TCQsQZcm_dW6g0BiqnEGlVU9_i-OntHJ0C4kAA6sECFg4dGSMwLarnFeJ8SIy39OeEWF6yHw9ucj-guII40Nf83Za0L_6R6pAy13GLagZ4cR7QYNf96VaeRD3wy5YOVVpu_QYokg/s320/pexels-akil-mazumder-1072824.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>Welcome to this week’s Wireless Noodle where I’ll be delving into the break up of IBM, a couple of fascinating technologies in the form of DECT 2020 NR and the Digital Annealer, and a snapshot of some of Transforma Insights’ work on IoT forecasts and what they tell us about the market. Along the way I’ll give you one of the most cursory explanations you’ll ever hear of quantum computing, and further expand on the ideas around unicorns that I shared a few episodes ago.</p><p><></p><p>First to talk about a big news item this week. </p><p>In an interesting move, one of the big companies that I watch, IBM, has decided to <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/9/21508974/ibm-split-into-two-companies-newco-hybrid-cloud-legacy-it">split its business in two</a>.</p><p>Newco focused on “managed infrastructure services”, so legacy enterprise ICT infrastructure. IBM will carry on, focused on hybrid cloud and AI. That includes technology platforms (particularly based on the Openshift platform from the recently acquired RedHat). And digital transformation thrown in for good measure. Essentially it’s splitting between the mature legacy parts of the business, and the new growth ones. The markets liked it, with shares going up 6%. </p><p>And I like it too. There will always be friction in any organisation that is trying to maintain an existing product base while also going out to find new markets. One always ends up being sacrificed for the other. It’s analogous to the conversations I have with enterprises trying to implement new technology, IoT or whatever. If it’s left to the IT dept there are often problems. They’re responsible for keeping the wheels on. And everything else gets sacrificed for that. Which means that handing new initiatives to them can often mean slow progress. Better that there is a different group (a CTO office perhaps) that handles the new stuff. </p><p>Just as within a company you can only be responsible for day-to-day OR new expansion, I’m of the view that a company can only be a growth business, or sweat assets, but can’t really do both. Ultimately no business is organised to do both things. </p><p>Let’s talk about Kodak. That company usually gets trotted out as a cautionary fable for technology businesses. People often talk about Kodak as a failed company. Its market evaporated and it failed to pivot to digital, despite having made some interesting innovation in the space. But I have a different perspective. Perhaps what it did was rational. What are the chances that Kodak would have been a digital photography leader? Moderate. So it would have to go through radical upheaval, probably sacrificing its legacy business, and sinking in pots of cash, in exchange for a moderate chance of being a leader in a new market. This is survivorship bias from another angle. The assumption that Kodak would have succeeded if it had pivoted, obviously. But not obviously, of course. It was one of dozens of players, many of whom had much deeper pockets and much more of a heritage in consumer electronics.</p><p>The ultimate irony is that, as it turns out, digital cameras was a market that would be supplanted by phone cameras anyway. So, even with hindsight people think Kodak should have pivoted to a market (digital photography) that would evaporate within a decade. </p><p>I would argue that probably Kodak made the rational choice. Batten down the hatches, cut costs, sweat your legacy asset for all it’s worth, and write a poetic valedictory farewell. Very occasionally companies make effective pivots away from legacy businesses and towards new growth markets. </p><p>Which brings us naturally to IBM. It has a strong heritage of dropping (divesting, call it what you will) legacy parts of its business, PCs being the most obvious, which it did, what, 20+ years ago. And it is perhaps not too surprising that it has chosen to move away again from the legacy business, this time spinning it off into a new entity. There is a risk to this strategy. If you keep on rolling the dice, you’ll get a 1 eventually! But, sticking with a legacy business is a risk in its own right.</p><p>This brings me back to the idea of unicorn companies that I discussed in Episode 9. Often big tech companies try to imitate unicorns. They do this by imitating what they think is the characteristic of the successful company. Beanbags and pool tables, perhaps. But actually the main characteristic of a successful start up is that it has a lot of peers that fail. Big companies don’t have that luxury. As such they will generally be better off taking advantage of the one sure-fire advantage that they have and riding that as far as it goes. That might be scale and incumbency; it’s hard (but not impossible) to start a new car manufacturer. Or it may be a scarce resource, such as a mobile network licence. Those kinds of advantage guarantee a certain scale of success, and longevity. But not super-normal margins. </p><p>I come back to the telecoms industry time and again, not least because it’s the one I know the best. Telcos often fret about relatively low margins. And in part this is caused by strict regulation. But strict regulation is necessary where you have a triopoly as you do in most mobile markets, for instance. Barriers to entry there are very high. You need a permit from the government and a hefty chunk of a scarce resource (mobile spectrum). In exchange you’re guaranteed a big slug of revenue. And an almost cast-iron guarantee that you’re not going to go bust. 15 years ago Nokia, as a mobile phone maker, was huge. Today it doesn’t exist, other than as a licensed brand. And in the meantime the mobile operators have chugged along doing what they do. The brand names have changed a bit and there has been some M&A, but ostensibly it’s the same companies. Slow and steady won the race.</p><p>Which brings me back to IBM. Incidentally, I am currently writing a report specifically on the subject of its split for <a href="https://transformainsights.com/">Transforma Insights</a>. IBM is not in a safe space. It is in a highly disruptive space, and it is pursuing a strategy of cutting itself free from its low margin safe space. But it has the ability to adapt. But the biggest challenge is not so much which technology areas it focuses on, but the fact that it is trying to move from being a services company to being a products company. It has demonstrated the ability to shift from hardware to services. The next shift is from services to software products. This, more than any change in the technology focus, is the big change. </p><p><></p><p>Now I want to introduce a new little segment to the podcast where I talk about a great new technology or vendor (or two) that I’ve come across recently. </p><p>The first is the rather dull sounding DECT 2020 new radio. Actually this could have dropped into the news section as they were involved in a fairly big announcement last week about <a href="https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/press-releases/1839-2020-10-etsi-launches-dect-2020-new-radio-interface-for-iot">ETSI announcing the standard</a>. The standard operates in unlicensed spectrum in a dedicated frequency band at 1900MHz (although it can operate in loads of different bands). It uses all sorts of clever modulation techniques to deliver ultra reliable and low latency connectivity for low bandwidth IoT devices. Thanks to some clever interference management techniques it can operate as a mesh or a hub-and-spoke system even with incredibly high density of devices. The self-organising capability means any given node is able to dynamically adapt to performing either role. </p><p>All of this means that for dense IoT networks, for instance smart metering, you can drop in a cellular device every so often and then have the other devices mesh with it. It has all the self-healing benefits of a decentralised architecture. And all of this without any need for infrastructure, other than the occasional backhaul device. 5km range. There’s also good power saving functionality although obviously that depends on what role the device might be playing. Battery life could be 5 years though. </p><p>I think this genuinely looks like a fascinating new access technology. The big contributor to the standard has been a company called <a href="https://wirepas.com/">Wirepas</a>, which has been offering effectively this technology for a while, using 2.4GHz spectrum. Genuinely fascinating as a technology. </p><p>The second today is Fujitsu’s <a href="https://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/business-services/digital-annealer/">Digital Annealer</a>. Some of you will be familiar with quantum computing, or at least the concept of it. Specifically, that it’s a probabilistic system based on quantum bits (or qubits), whose state as a 1 or a 0 is rather more flexible, shall we say, than in traditional computing. </p><p>And what is a probabilistic system. Well it doesn’t ‘know’ what the answer is, but suggests what it probably is. This can be very effective. It’s much the same way that I used to be good at pub quizzes. I don’t *know* that many answers, but I’m a very good guesser based on how the question is phrased, the level of difficulty of the other questions, things that are likely to come up etc. </p><p>The Digital Annealer is described as being ‘inspired by’ quantum computing. Specifically, to solve what are called combinatorial optimisation problems. And what are combinatorial optimisation problems I hear you cry? It’s where you have a complex system with lots of moving parts which are interlinked. An example might be staff scheduling, or school timetabling, or supply chain logistics. There are probably lots of different ways of ‘solving’ a problem, but there are also probably some optimal ways of doing it. The Digital Annealer is used to optimise these systems, running many cycles to identify what is probably (and increasingly likely to be) the optimal configuration. Very interesting stuff, and useful in all sorts of fields of study that we have at Transforma Insights, such as system, workflow, transport or logistics optimisation.</p><p>That’s a couple of interesting techs that have come across my desk in the last few weeks, very abridged explanations. If you want to know more, get in touch. </p><p><></p><p>Part of the reason why things have been a bit quiet on the podcasting front for a couple of weeks is that we at Transforma Insights have been publishing a set of press releases featuring our newly expanded IoT forecasts. And we’re going to be running a <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/join-transforma-insights-webinar-forecasting-iot-opportunity">webinar about it on the 2nd November</a>.</p><p>I just want to whet your appetite a little by sharing some of the areas that we’ve highlighted in the new research. </p><p>First up is 5G. I’ve talked about it a bit in the recent past. It’s a subject that gets a lot of attention at the moment, not least because a lot of companies are looking for a use case to justify huge investment. The people flogging 5G tend to speak about IoT as a killer use case a lot, so it’s worth us digging in a bit.</p><p>The message from our forecasts is that 5G in IoT will grow quite rapidly. But there’s a big caveat. Overall we expect cellular technologies, i.e. those rolled out and run by mobile network operators, to grow from 1 billion IoT devices at the end of 2019 to 5.4 billion at the end of 2030. Pretty healthy growth, but not exactly a hockey stick. Of that 5.4 billion, 3.3 billion will be 5G. Which sounds like a stonking win for the technology doesn’t it?</p><p>But (and it’s a big but), of those 2.7 billion (80%) will be using the Narrowband IoT and LTE-M technologies that already exist today, and have been dragged kicking and screaming into 5G as massive-Machine-Type-Communications (mMTC). As I said in the press release we issued, this is not an overwhelming rush for high bandwidth, low latency connections. This growth in 5G is predominantly a reflection of the re-categorisation of these mMTC technologies, and their successors, as 5G.</p><p>Ignoring the mMTC technologies, LTE remains the workhorse for IoT. More on which applications are using 5G in the press release.</p><p>On the subject of Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies, of which the new mMTC technologies are one component, we also have some interesting findings on this. From just 220 million devices today, these will grow to 4 billion in 2030. The family of technologies are low cost, there is rapid network roll out happening and they have capabilities that are well suited to lots of IoT applications. We expect big things. About 2/3 will be the mMTC technologies I mentioned earlier. The other 1/3 will use other technologies, predominantly LoRa. About half of those will use public networks (i.e. where there is a network operator that sets up and runs the network), and about half private networks (where the organisation runs the network itself).</p><p>Which is a neat segue to the third topic I want to talk about, which is private networks. Specifically, actually, mobile private networks, so not the unlicensed LoRa networks that were relevant to LPWA. This is about, again, 5G networks. Mostly it’s for factories and ports and similar campus-style environments. And actually, as it turns out, quite a lot of use in agriculture according to the Transforma Insights forecasts. Which makes sense. Lots of mobile operators see private networks as a good opportunity in 5G. Although truth be told most private networks don’t really need the capabilities that 5G delivers. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of spectrum being made available for private deployments in various countries. In Germany, for instance, 74 licences were issued in September for Lokale Netze using 3.7-3.8GHz spectrum to companies such as BASF, Bosch, BMW and some companies not beginning with B.</p><p>Which reminds me of another piece of news last week. This whole episode could have just been based on news items of the week. The item was Verizon announcing that in conjunction with Nokia it would be offering mobile private network services in Europe and Asia-Pac. No reason why not. Good opportunity to extend services into non-footprint markets as far as I’m concerned. </p><p>Don’t forget to <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/join-transforma-insights-webinar-forecasting-iot-opportunity">register for the webinar on the 2nd November</a> when you can hear more from the team at Transforma Insights.</p><p><></p><p>Next week, amongst other things, I’ll be sharing some of the interesting discussions from the<a href="https://www.terrapinn.com/conference/total-telecom-congress/index.stm"> Total Telecom Congress</a> which is happening on the day that the podcast goes out. I’m chairing a couple of sessions. One looking at smart cities, the other focused on how telcos make money out of IoT. They’ll be available on demand and I’ll be talking about them and the great insights from the panellists on next week’s episode. I’ll also be digging into some more interesting news and some more interesting tech.</p><p>And another reminder about our webinar. It’s on the 2nd November at 8am Pacific, 11am Eastern, 4pm UK, 5pm for most of Europe. A link to register is on the <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/join-transforma-insights-webinar-forecasting-iot-opportunity">Transforma Insights</a> website on the events page, and I’ll also pop a <a href="https://www.anymeeting.com/AccountManager/RegEv.aspx?PIID=EF55D785814939">link</a> on the Wireless Noodle transcript.</p><p>I hope you can join me, both for next week’s podcast, and for the webinar. </p><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-18113898906126669992020-10-07T10:40:00.007+01:002020-10-07T10:47:41.020+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 10: The what, when and why of Artificial General Intelligence<p>Matt delves into the murky world of Artificial General Intelligence, the aspirational end goal for billions of dollars of investment, but with little clear idea of what the applied benefit might be. He asks what AGI is, discrete from AI as a whole, who is doing it and why? On the way he explores David Beckham's right boot, the threat of extra-terrestrial invasion, the reason why the hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft are so interested, Nvidia’s likely acquisition of ARM and the arrival of GPT-3.</p><p>You can access it <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/what-when-why-artificial-general-intelligence/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>.</p><p>The full transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6MnTQ3khZl6xgx-GdbkkJz9K9PMEpG0GuiQEZYss_2eyYW6iK9Ulq59Zts4vAwc5e4A5ECYPMQKB3dIX63hodF0EmEXSq_q4PLe8fhyphenhyphenWqtsU_MqvMiUHDWo7Nki_dIhc7oY5NywH2TaPj/s2541/pexels-lukas-296302+%25281%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1238" data-original-width="2541" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6MnTQ3khZl6xgx-GdbkkJz9K9PMEpG0GuiQEZYss_2eyYW6iK9Ulq59Zts4vAwc5e4A5ECYPMQKB3dIX63hodF0EmEXSq_q4PLe8fhyphenhyphenWqtsU_MqvMiUHDWo7Nki_dIhc7oY5NywH2TaPj/s320/pexels-lukas-296302+%25281%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>Artificial General Intelligence: What is it? Why is it important? Who is interested in it? And why?</p><p><> </p><p>Today I want to talk about Artificial Intelligence. It’s a topic that bubbles away in the background of what a lot of technology companies are doing, and occasionally bursts into the headlines.</p><p>Sometimes it’s in quite a dramatic way, such as <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/13/elon-musk-at-sxsw-a-i-is-more-dangerous-than-nuclear-weapons.html">Elon Musk expressing deep concern about its dangers</a>, having invested a billion in DeepMind, one of the leaders in the field.</p><p>Or there’s the more subtle stuff where the growing importance of AI has a knock-on effect on other commercial things. Recently <a href="https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for-40-billion-creating-worlds-premier-computing-company-for-the-age-of-ai">Nvidia opened up discussions to buy ARM from Softbank</a>. Nvidia makes chips. ARM designs chips. Seems like a reasonable match up, right? Except not really, because it causes lots of friction between ARM and all the other chip manufacturers for who it does similar work. This may accelerate the development of open-source equivalents to what ARM does. On that basis it’s perhaps surprising that the value of ARM to a company that is potentially closing off a lot of its sales opportunities, is rated so high. Nvidia clearly sees the additional market upside from the combination of its hardware capabilities with ARM’s R&D and design as more than compensating for the drop off in ARM business.</p><p>The reason: Artificial Intelligence. Nvidia sees a massive opportunity in chips associated with running AI.</p><p>Partly that’s quantitative. There will be a lot more demand. To be optimised you need to put the AI as close to the thing it’s controlling as possible, which means more processing close to the edge device. Which itself also means more processors. For instance, autonomous vehicles will need onboard processing. They can’t rely on using processing at a centralised data centre. The round trip time (or latency as I discussed in episode 6 when I talked a bit about 5G and the move to the edge) is just too long to cope with real-time decision making. Too late. You’ve already driven into a lamp-post. So, you need a lot more processors distributed as close to the edge application as possible. More devices, bigger market.</p><p>Also it’s qualitatively different. Processors for AI, so called AI Accelerators, are optimised for it, offering everyone involved a much greater opportunity for differentiation than there has been for years. And typically this means more profitable products.</p><p>Based on all this (lots more chips with better margin), Nvidia can seemingly see sufficient profit in there, courtesy of AI, to justify a USD40bn investment.</p><p>And probably with good reason. In our review at Transforma Insights of where companies were investing money, we see over USD1 trillion of investment globally in AI over the next decade. It’s a magnet for an enormous amount of spend by technology giants.</p><p>But I don’t want to try to cover the whole topic. What I want to look at specifically is the bit that has Elon Musk spooked. Artificial General Intelligence, trying to recreate an equivalent of human intelligence.</p><p><> </p><p>Firstly, what is it? For AI broadly there’s a million definitions. I rather like Elaine Rich of the University of Texas’s definition, which she applied to AI more broadly, but I think is a good way of thinking about AGI. She said “it is the study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better.”</p><p>AGI is a subset of that. Broadly speaking most people would define AGI as being ‘strong’ AI that is able to perform a range of tasks in a range of environments based on independent decision making that replicates human behaviour. There are other elements that have been proposed too, such as self-awareness (although I’m not 100% sure we can assume that applies to actual humans in all cases) and an understanding that others have their own beliefs, desires etc. Again, insert your own joke here.</p><p>This contrasts with ‘weak’ or ‘narrow’ AI which simulates human behaviour in carrying out a very narrow task, albeit often brilliantly. Lest we forget, in 1997 IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, marking the last point at which a human was the best chess player in the world. But Deep Blue could ONLY play chess. AGI isn’t about being brilliant at a single task, it’s about being more broadly able to replicate what humans can do.</p><p>OK, then let’s think about the process of how to develop these capabilities.</p><p>The most basic form of AI, beyond just simple if-this-then-that expert systems is ‘Machine Learning’, which is about the application of statistical techniques and the use of experience to learn. It breaks down into various types. Supervised ML is trained using large amounts of labelled data for instance to identify pictures of cats (if you like). Unsupervised is more sophisticated, being given a set of data and asked to create a framework to understand it, for instance with customer segmentation. Tell the AI what the characteristics are of the users and it will identify trends and patterns. And there are others.</p><p>The next step on from ML (and a subset of it) is Deep Learning which involves self-teaching algorithms aimed at recognising, analysing and interpreting data. This is the area where there have been big breakthroughs in the past few years leading to the current round of innovation. Essentially deep learning is about using enormous amounts of data and techniques that imitate human thought.</p><p>The hope is, of course, that these break-throughs from machine learning to deep learning end up helping us on the road to AGI. But as yet the most obvious the distinction between different types of AI is this: between AI that exists (machine learning, natural language processing, chat bots and so forth) and AI that doesn’t exist, that being something that actually looks like intelligence.</p><p>This presupposes a couple of things. First that it’s achievable. We just don’t know. Ray Kurzweil, who I mentioned in a previous episode thinks it’ll be between 2015 and 2045 and in 2012 a couple of researchers from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute looked at 95 predictions with typical predictions of 15-25 years. But others (particularly more recently) have put it well towards the end of the 21C, if at all.</p><p>The second that it’s identifiable. It’s too clear we’d know it if we saw it. One test is the Turing Test, that an AI should be indistinguishable from a human to a neutral observer, which I guess is as good a mechanism as any. But is that perhaps missing the point that artificial intelligence may be completely different (and therefore easily distinguishable from) human intelligence.</p><p>To further complicate things, I would suggest that all of the AI that has been developed thus far isn’t even intelligence as it should be understood. AI thus far is actually Artificial Wisdom. Intelligence is different.</p><p>I think a good definition of ‘intelligence’ is the ability to work out how to perform a task with no experience. Making a pool shot based on calculating angles rather than having played a million shots. I remember a news article about how David Beckham was a ‘genius’ for calculating angles of his free kicks. But he didn’t. He performed the same task a million times and saw the results.</p><p>Translate this into AI. When it comes, Artificial General Intelligence can’t be based on the same massive training sets as Machine/Deep Learning. What Beckham (or a pool player) does is reinforcement learning. Not AGI. AGI should be able to work out how to do a task without trying it before.</p><p>But it’s likely that no matter how intelligent the AGI, it won’t clear up, or hit ‘top bins’ first time out. Einstein may have been able to work out the angles for a sweet break but he would not have executed as well as Ronnie O’Sullivan.</p><p>All this makes me think that AGI and Machine Learning are actually two separate disciplines. Intelligence vs Wisdom if you like. What we have created thus far is Artificial Wisdom. Artificial Intelligence may be completely different.</p><p>Mostly at TI what we care about is how enterprises might use AI to get a leg up. In that context ‘wisdom’ is just fine. Show me a piece of ML that has practised what I want it to do a million times and refined it to the nth degree and can do it for me, I’m happy. I don’t need it to be able to independently work out how to submit an invoice, summarise a legal document or crunch my numbers. It’s perfectly fine for it to have had a million opportunities to hone its capabilities to perform that specific task that I’m asking it to.</p><p>So, is true AI, AGI, call it what you will, really of much practical use? As with most tech there’s probably diminishing returns. The first uses of AI for automating processes can knock out a whole load of costs and make things run much more efficiently. Gradually those processes are refined and applied to more marginal use cases.</p><p>So, we can characterise AGI as almost impossible to define, hard to achieve (probably) and (perhaps) likely of marginal use. Nevertheless there are dozens of organisations spending vast amounts on researching it. Who are they, and why? </p><p><> </p><p>So, who wants it? Well, there are enough companies out there sinking billions into investments that someone really wants to reach AGI. There are around 50 organisations according to some reckonings, although how many there might be in China is very hard to fathom. The biggest that we know of are the likes of DeepMind (which was acquired by Google in 2014), Human Brain Project (funded by the EU) and OpenAI (which was initially set up by Elon Musk and others, and is now funded to the tune of USD1 billion by Microsoft).</p><p>Have you noticed how, when it comes to intriguing new technology it’s the same companies coming up again and again? Amazon, Microsoft and Google.</p><p>Why? Fear. Fear that someone else will get there first and it will prove a critical competitive differentiator. Because it promises to (as famously said in The Terminator) learn at a geometric rate, which ultimately puts every conceivable and most inconceivable technological developments in play.</p><p>Liu Cixin talks in his marvellous book The Three Body Problem about the process of identifying existential threats to the People’s Republic of China, and specifically ones that no-one has thought about. Unknown unknowns, if you like. The key hypothesis is that the US makes contact with an alien civilisation and thus benefits from superior technology. It’s the ultimate in horizon scanning that I talked about in Episode 4.</p><p>Now, I’m not suggesting we should be reaching for our telescopes. But, for major corporations that seemingly have unchallengeable positions in their respective parts of the ICT ecosystem, AI represents a challenge. If it really can learn at a geometric rate, perhaps it will take a few days to develop a software suite that’s better than Windows (again, insert your own joke here) or a better search engine than Google. Or maybe it develops something that completely changes the technology paradigm. Something that can be inserted directly into the brain, for instance. We don’t know. And that’s the point. These AGI investments are a form of insurance policy against the worst case scenario that it is a massive disruptor, or indeed a massive opportunity. And so it may prove. Or it may be nothing at all. The one thing we can be sure of is that the quantities of money involved, albeit in the billions of dollars, are no indication that AGI is achievable.</p><p><> </p><p>There’s been a lot of talk recently about a technology called GPT-3, which was developed by OpenAI. I recommend you check out some of the news articles about it because it looks pretty fantastic. So, what is it and what does it do? And crucially what doesn’t it do?</p><p>GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer (no relation), and the 3 is because it’s the third iteration. It has been trained on 570GB of text from the internet to provide answers to questions, or to write you a poem, or even write code. Anything involving text. It has, effectively, learnt to understand text input and predict what a useful output will be to the user’s command.</p><p>It looks pretty revolutionary at least for simple requests. The more complex the requests become (e.g. to write a 1,000 word essay rather than a 10 word statement) the more the cracks start to show. Another weakness is the sheer volume of compute power required to run it. This is brute force AI. Simply using trial and error backed up by enormous data sets and oodles of processing to attempt to fool the watcher that it understands, when actually all it’s doing is predicting what will earn it a (figurative) biscuit. If the user types in x and y, this 570GB of data indicates that I *should* respond with z. </p><p>But it’s also interesting because it’s unsupervised learning. There’s no indication in the training of what’s right or wrong. Just a large volume of data.</p><p>As mentioned, perhaps it’s a step along the way. Or perhaps it’s not. But picture a world in which GPT-4 or 5 is unleashed on the world, able to carry out human like conversations. Or, more accurately, to imitate human conversations. How long before it floods twitter and the internet overall. Pretty soon every document is written by an AI. And eventually perhaps AIs are the only things reading them, constantly attempting to refine how human-like their text can be. Makes you think doesn’t it?</p><p><> </p><p>This week’s final thought is an invitation. At Transforma Insights we’re running a <a href="https://www.anymeeting.com/AccountManager/RegEv.aspx?PIID=EF55D785814939">webinar on the 2nd November</a> on a topic that’s close to our heart, IoT connectivity, and specifically our forecasts of the market opportunity there. We will be talking about new narrowband Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) network technologies, 5G and private networks. All topics that I’ve covered at various points in the podcast.</p><p>One thing I keep forgetting to do is ask all you good people to kindly rate the podcast in wherever you download it. That helps tremendously with getting attention.</p><p>I’m going to be taking a break for a couple of weeks from the podcast, but will be back on the 27th October to give some views on that IoT growth that we’re covering in the webinar.</p><p>I hope you can join me.</p><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-72686861246509493492020-09-29T12:15:00.002+01:002020-09-29T12:15:13.867+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 9: Not everyone grows up to be a unicorn<p>In this episode we examine technology 'unicorns', start-ups that command huge valuations. In particular we look at the different valuations of hardware, software and services companies, and why some are considered more attractive than others, and why this might be heavily influenced by survivorship bias leading to some poor decisions to pivot what companies focus on. </p><p>You can access it <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/not-everyone-grows-unicorn/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>.</p><p>The full transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-BP1-ES_LJLgiHC1NkKaAYmtC1-TYKETNE1VA6Nk9xrYKKcKosJIc51eoQ2DoymDZLIJVvd_giMtheb8PfG3ZO2j5o4pZuLV0RzllW9eNNNFZWsWQ_QBpNB3WuBz_cjG0RCCYEch2TqFh/s916/pexels-mark-glancy-1564506.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="514" data-original-width="916" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-BP1-ES_LJLgiHC1NkKaAYmtC1-TYKETNE1VA6Nk9xrYKKcKosJIc51eoQ2DoymDZLIJVvd_giMtheb8PfG3ZO2j5o4pZuLV0RzllW9eNNNFZWsWQ_QBpNB3WuBz_cjG0RCCYEch2TqFh/s320/pexels-mark-glancy-1564506.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>There are a few shining examples of fantastically successful technology vendors. You know who I’m talking about. But why do so many seem to make such a pig’s ear of addressing emerging new spaces?</p><p><></p><p>Last week I talked about hyperscalers who are very successful and very big. Today I want to look at smaller companies. The Unicorns, and wannabe unicorns. And particularly how chasing being a unicorn can have negative consequences for a company. </p><p><></p><p>First up, as we get into the autumn (or fall), the technology news start to come thick and fast. I’ve rather ignored big events over the summer, as there wasn’t a huge amount happening. Never is. But I think it’s now worth having a bit of a dig into some of the news stories of the week at the start of these podcasts. </p><p>The first thing I want to cover is an acquisition. Last week <a href="https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2020/9/ericsson-accelerates-5g-for-enterprise-with-acquisition-of-cradlepoint">Ericsson bought Cradlepoint for $1.1 billion</a>. Ericsson, if you’re not familiar with them, is a massive manufacturer of telecoms network equipment. Cradlepoint makes edge gateways and routers, hardware that sits in particularly vehicles, as well as factories and so on. This is a clear illustration of the changing dynamics of the telecom industry that I talked about in Episode 3 I talked about separation, innovation, explosion and particularly about the telecoms industry, and how there’s a lot of evolution going on in the space, with changing roles for who does what. In this case, it’s about Ericsson directly addressing enterprise customers, particularly for 5G private networks, i.e. a company has a dedicated network all of its own. They can sell them more-or-less a full offering covering hardware, network equipment and some software. </p><p>Some will argue that this puts Ericsson back into direct competition with its customers, the telcos. The idea of selling direct to enterprises was dropped back in 2017 to focus on being the operator’s friends and competing with Huawei. It all depends on execution though. Telcos have neither infrastructure nor hardware to sell to enterprise customers. So it doesn’t appear to compete directly on that. But it’s a bit more subtle than that. Once you have network equipment and hardware you don’t need much else, particularly if there’s dedicated spectrum, as there is in some markets. </p><p>Two thoughts strike me though. Firstly increasingly we see private 5G offers as being hybrid offers, including both an on-premises service and wide area connectivity when away from the campus. Think about supply chain or similar. Also, in many cases offerings from CSPs are based on a ramp up from using a slice of a public network through to using a private network. Potentially a much more appealing proposition. We shouldn’t necessarily assume that Ericsson wants to sell directly either. Its offer could be a white label solution, giving its operator customers a Private 5G in a box to sell to customers. Just add spectrum. </p><p>The other big acquisition is Nvidia of ARM. It has taken on all sorts of political connotations but it’s particularly interesting in the context of AI. So I’ll talk about it next week when I delve into that particular topic. Although I will talk about ARM a little later in the context of its sale to Softbank a few years ago.</p><p>Second up is an announcement from <a href="https://www.semtech.com/company/press/semtech-and-amazon-collaborate-to-provide-low-power-connectivity-for-consumer-applications-on-amazon-sidewalk">Semtech and Amazon</a>. I mentioned Semtech back in Episode 6. It’s the company that ostensibly developed the LoRa LPWA technology. Under the new agreement LoRa will be used in Sidewalk, which is Amazon’s ‘neighbourhood network’ which initially focused on Bluetooth Low Energy to connect devices via so called Sidewalk Bridge devices, which include the Ring Cams and more critically Amazon Echo devices, which are today in half of US households. The range of BLE is about 100m. The range of Lora is several kilometers. 2-3 in urban areas, 7-10 in rural, perhaps. In fact the <a href="https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/article/lorawan-distance-world-record">furthest range that has ever been recorded is 766km</a>. About 500 miles. But that is, shall we say, extreme. The addition of LoRa therefore takes things to another level, creating a crowd-sourced network potentially covering the vast majority of households, at least in the US, whether they’re Echo users, or not. There may be a few issue to be resolved about the extent to which users will be comfortable with their broadband connection being used to connect other people’s devices. But the traffic will be tiny, and there’s good precedent for this type of model. In France the broadband operators used to split their client’s in-home WiFi (with their permission) between half the bands for the household and half the bands for the public. Plenty of other broadband providers around the world also did it. The flip side is whether people or businesses will be comfortable having their devices connected via someone else’s Echo and broadband connection. Obviously there’s issues of security and reliability to be overcome. </p><p>Big changes, from both Ericsson and Amazon in terms of the devices at the edge of the network. It’s a hot topic.</p><p><></p><p>Onto the meat of today’s episode. I want to look a bit at unicorns. Not the fictional beasts but as a term for startup companies as coined in 2013 by Aileen Lee for startups valued at over $1bn. And specifically how some companies get to be unicorns, and how some don’t. </p><p>One good starting point is looking at the sale prices that various technology companies have managed to achieve, and the characteristics of those companies. </p><p>In this case specifically I want to talk about IoT and the measure of revenue multiples. That being the ratio of sale price to the revenue a company made at the point when it was sold. It’s is a crude benchmark for any organisation’s valuation. It ignores intellectual property, debt, underlying strong or weak management, and demand-side drivers around how desperate the buyer might be for the assets, and many other things besides. However, it does point to a trend.</p><p>By doing this analysis of recent sales (there’s a chart on the Wireless Noodle site) one major trend leaps out: hardware vendors (except those making semiconductors) and connectivity companies are valued a lot less than software companies. When Sierra Wireless bought IoT MVNO Numerex in 2017 the multiple on revenue was approximately 1.5x. Numerex had quite a few problems, and a betting man would have said that was probably a low water mark for this particular part of the value chain sector. In comparison, when Kore Wireless acquired Raco in 2015 the comparable figure was around 3x revenue. So a range of 1.5-3x for connectivity providers. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxGGfBvTKv0xlfWv7iHOsuvgdbapV5fxkPeD80O-BlYcBKKe7zhSnF3HOT9A1vuIF-8wt7KNmpv5NrNOWHJNMe-3lmM56zTOcX0N33DeS97hg_GXdTo-mbPUzIk4KgrshvX8OadCJEkbBF/s928/IoT-rev-multiple-2020.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="714" data-original-width="928" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxGGfBvTKv0xlfWv7iHOsuvgdbapV5fxkPeD80O-BlYcBKKe7zhSnF3HOT9A1vuIF-8wt7KNmpv5NrNOWHJNMe-3lmM56zTOcX0N33DeS97hg_GXdTo-mbPUzIk4KgrshvX8OadCJEkbBF/s320/IoT-rev-multiple-2020.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>For hardware vendors it was typically even lower. Often little more than 1x revenue, although Ericsson’s Cradlepoint acquisition last week was about 6x revenue. So a significant outlier. </p><p>In comparison, software companies can secure a valuation (or sale price) of 15-20 times revenue. This might seem to dictate that software is the route to great fortune.</p><p>This is not necessarily true. The multiples of revenue for the successful sales are much higher. However, what is ignored are the hundreds of software start-ups that never go anywhere. Part of the reason for low valuations on the hardware side of the house is that there is almost always some residual business left that has some intrinsic value even if it has long ago drifted away from profitability. For software firms, that tends not to be the case.</p><p>Survivorship bias is a massive challenge in the technology world. Those small fraction of software players who manage to hit a demand sweet spot, typically at just the time when a moneybags buyer identifies a gap in its portfolio, can command 10x+ multiples on revenue. Anyone looking at the market opportunity in IoT will tend to focus on that too. For module manufacturers, for instance, who can typically only command 1-2x revenue valuations, the idea of diversifying into the software platform space is clearly tempting. However, the chances of hitting the jackpot and coming up with (by build, borrow or buy) a winning formula in the software space are low.</p><p>As ever, recommendations to organisations to diversify outside of their core business area, usually at substantial cost, are only worthwhile if that vendor proves against the odds to be successful at it. Part of the challenge is that it’s not entirely unheard of. The real success story was Jasper which pivoted from MVNO to software platform company, but its overnight success took the best part of a decade. The multiple in that instance was almost 20x revenue. On the hardware side, Silver Spring Networks’ acquisition by Itron was based on a revenue multiple that was edging towards 3x. Despite being predominantly a hardware company it had also developed a strong management platform alongside. However, the analogy with latter-stage diversification is not a great one, as SilverSpring built the platform capabilities much more organically alongside the hardware/networking offering.</p><p>The software market has the lowest barriers to entry of any space, but nominally commands the highest multiples on sales. However, what this fails to take into account is the number of software players that have fallen by the wayside in the interim (as noted above). The average multiple is hard to calculate without an effective way of including shuttered start-ups. But safe to say that the 20x+ revenue multiple exits are the exception rather than the rule.</p><p>The other variable that needs to be considered is scalability. Software platforms are almost universally scalable, allowing the vendor to sell to every client with almost no incremental cost, other than the direct cost of sales. The manufacture of silicon chips is as close to scalable as the hardware space gets. Module manufacture and reselling of connectivity have been much more localised and less scalable. The least scalable function is that of consulting or systems integration. As a result, valuations of organisations performing such functions will necessarily be lower. However, all of this presupposes that valuation is the ultimate goal. Not every company can be a unicorn, and the space for potential unicorns is crowded. It was interesting to see hardware vendor Libelium decide to diversify not into software, but into consulting and implementation services. That’s where there is money to be made, and real client need. </p><p>The final thing to consider is maturity. Any business that has not yet reached a steady-state can not realistically be valued based on a multiple of revenues. This naturally over-inflates the value of fast growing businesses when considered in terms of multiple of revenue; they just haven’t reached a reasonable revenue figure by which to be judged.</p><p>Diversifying out of core business and into an adjacent part of the market is an overly simplistic solution to any organisations’ woes, particularly if all it is trying to do is boost its valuation. Diversifying to secure synergies is a far more defensible strategy. Having eyes on the unicorn prize means that most hardware and connectivity vendors will miss the fact that high value software exits are the exception rather than the rule.</p><p><></p><p>Vendors trying to be unicorns created a whole lot of extra friction in the market. One of the things I tried to do in the book I wrote recently, The Internet of Things Myth is provide instead some recommendations for how vendors can help to nurture a progressive ecosystem, as well as make a buck or two for themselves. I’m happy to share a brief summary of that here.</p><p>Make sure you’re not just following the herd. You can’t just plunge into IoT and expect to make money just because it’s a growth area. An undifferentiated ‘me too’ approach drives out value and ultimately doesn’t benefit the arriviste organisation: for instance, it’s hard to structure your organisation to sell new products, and margins are compromised. There is nothing wrong with building a set of capabilities to be useful in IoT. But it does have to be useful. SAP, for instance, has done a good job of pivoting a set of capabilities aimed at ERP towards IoT, a natural development.</p><p>Focus on your own piece of the value chain. It’s hard to be good at someone else’s job. As a complement to the previous point, most companies find it hard enough to be good at properly addressing the needs of their own market, let alone someone else’s. If you want to move into another part of the value chain you had better be at least 50% better than the incumbents. That generally means the application of scale, extension of capabilities through acquisition, or significant investment in building new capabilities. </p><p>Value, not valuation. Stop worrying about being a unicorn and look at where the gaps are. Some IoT companies will be valued at billions of dollars. Probably yours isn’t one of them. Stop worrying about finding the infinitely scalable universally adopted platform play. Start looking at where there are gaps to be filled and problems to be solved. A lot of the value that can be delivered in IoT in the next 10 years is in companies with know-how helping organisations with the practicalities of their deployments. </p><p>Steer your clients. The biggest potential pitfalls in deploying IoT in the enterprise are with the clients that are deploying rather than with the vendors that are developing. There are numerous challenges associated with implementing truly transformational IoT. Vendors need to steer their clients in the direction of making good decisions (as outlined below), for instance by ensuring that there is some commercial grounding for a PoC. It’s not good enough just to have a great product, you also need to provide leadership for your clients.</p><p>Show that you’re in it for the long haul. Most IoT investments, both consumer and enterprise involve some kind of long-term commitment to a particular product set whether it be an application development platform or a garage door. Everyone wants to be sure that their chosen provider/partner will continue to support the technology or product for the foreseeable future. Setting a precedent by abandoning products does not help with long-term certainty.</p><p>Secure by design. The single biggest concern for most people or organisations adopting IoT is security. This is worthy of a book in its own right. Put your product through penetration testing and honeypot trials. Following the introduction of the IoT Security Law which came into force in California at the beginning of 2020, it’s likely that lots of other countries will follow suit to introduce requirements for IoT devices to have “a reasonable security feature or features” anyway. Follow best practice such as the UK’s Code of Practice for Consumer IoT Security . </p><p>By following these simple rules, we think vendors will be much better placed to create an IoT ecosystem that works for everyone.</p><p><></p><p>This week’s final thought isn’t a final thought at all. It’s an opportunity. Specifically it’s an opportunity to win a copy of my book <a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/internet-of-things-myth">The Internet of Things Myth</a>. I won’t lie to you, I expected when I had boxes of books delivered to my house earlier this year that I’d get ample opportunity to hand them out. For obvious reasons that has proven not to be the case. So I have 20 to give away. To get hold of one, just follow the <a href="https://twitter.com/transformatweet">@TransformaTweet</a> account on Twitter. Further details and links are on the Wireless Noodle website. </p><p>Next week, as mentioned, I will be talking about AI and particularly the extent to which we might or might not get to Artificial General Intelligence.</p><p>I hope you can join me. </p><div><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p></div>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-10322995984597580222020-09-22T08:37:00.000+01:002020-09-22T08:37:00.333+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 8: Hyperscalers, the Edge and Network New Normal<p>The hyperscalers, AWS, Google and Microsoft, born out of massive scale cloud services are increasingly moving into diverse areas of ICT services and are likely to be the dominant force in tech markets. In this podcast we explore the origins of the hyperscalers, their increasing interest in the edge and providing network services, as well as consideration of their wider portfolio of products and services.</p><p>You can access it <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/hyperscalers-edge-network-new-normal/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>.</p><p>The full transcript of the podcast is available below. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihmAALhwduaALSPPuPhZM53HG8nqu6KcZErf3pYpnhHFuLMjLXbFzzznqJ51xtZiZi_OTokyxyFh-8dMSsKxJU6CTqpXYY3H277WyUH8IHmuvYnqJ69JSqBByZNhmjCAiCTdCBwRlmj_1Q/s1832/pexels-thisisengineering-3861969v2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="925" data-original-width="1832" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihmAALhwduaALSPPuPhZM53HG8nqu6KcZErf3pYpnhHFuLMjLXbFzzznqJ51xtZiZi_OTokyxyFh-8dMSsKxJU6CTqpXYY3H277WyUH8IHmuvYnqJ69JSqBByZNhmjCAiCTdCBwRlmj_1Q/s320/pexels-thisisengineering-3861969v2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>A lot is spoken about the FAANG companies, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google and how they dominate consumer media, communications and internet services. Personally I find them too diverse a bunch to think of collectively. Netflix is tiny by comparison to Apple. Why not include Spotify. Or Rakuten in Japan etc. It’s a bit like the obsession a few years ago with the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as if Argentina, Indonesia, Vietnam and so forth can just be ignored. But I digress.</p><p>In this episode I don’t want to think about the FAANG companies and what they’re doing for consumers, but to look at the equivalent for business. There are a set of so-called hyperscalers (or web scalers) which are starting to expand from their original positions, general in cloud hosting, to try to dominate the means for delivering enterprise services, and ultimately the actual enterprise services themselves.</p><p>There are three main players: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. One might also throw in Ali Baba as a Chinese equivalent. That leaves us with the rather unfortunate MAGA acronym, which I understand is already taken. So let’s stick with calling them hyperscalers. There are also a few areas where other companies such as IBM and Facebook also look a bit like these MAGA companies. So let’s keep the term broad.</p><p>Possibly the biggest question for most technology markets today is: what is the long term strategy for particularly these three companies and will they eat my lunch? In this episode there’s not enough time to categorically answer that question. But I want to share some thoughts about a few aspects.</p><p><> </p><p>What do we mean by hyperscalers? Originally the term came from the operation of very large scale data centers with thousands of services. Hence hyper-scale. That would have included the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google which built huge data centers initially to support their own products and services. Then some of them diversified into renting space in those data centers, and other associated services. </p><p>Take Amazon Web Services (AWS) for instance. While on its way to becoming the world’s biggest e-retailer, Amazon also built, out of necessity, a huge amount of competence in databases, compute and storage, and in running scalable data centers in a cost effective way to suit their low margin business. So it was a natural step to provide those infrastructure services to third parties. It then became self-reinforcing with AWS building further infrastructure and developing additional competencies to support an expanding set of clients for its cloud storage. In the latest quarterly revenue AWS accounted for 12.1% of Amazon revenue, and the majority of the company’s operating income. </p><p>The term hyperscaler, therefore, comes from the physical data center asset. But today it’s much more. Not least because the provision of compute and storage is not just about massive cloud data centers today.</p><p>Let’s take a step back and think about the rise of the cloud. Historically everyone stored there data on premises, in their own servers. Possibly with a back up located somewhere near. On the outskirts of the little village where I grew up was the HQ of a big insurance company. Obviously they had lots of records to store. And they had an off-site back up. Specifically they bought the nearest house (about 100m up a leafy lane from their site) and turned it into an off-site back up. Every so often you would see someone wheeling a cart full of (I guess) magnetic tapes up the lane to deposit them in the house. Kinda makes sense although I’m not sure today’s resiliency planning experts would think that much of it.</p><p>Over the last 15 or 20 years one of the defining trends of ICT has been the shift of enterprises (and consumers for that matter with iCloud, OneDrive etc.) to take advantage of the availability of common shared data centers. They provide much cheaper, scalable and resilient resources. Most companies have probably now made the move to cloud hosting over on-premises.</p><p>The last couple of years, however, have seen something of a shift to the edge. Central data storage is all very well, but for some applications you need your processing and data storage near to the application. The round trip delays of interrogating a central server hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away is just too much for some applications. The most often quoted is AI, which may need to make real-time decisions. Another is AR/VR where the sheer volume of data that needs to be sent and received effectively rules out storage in a central server, at least while the speed of light stays constant.</p><p>There’s also a residual demand from some customers, typically in industrial applications, to continue with an on-premise capability, for resilience.</p><p>All of this means that any company wishing to provide cloud services probably also needs an edge strategy (with edge maybe meaning the edge device, or the customer premises, or even a helpful spot quite close to the customer such as the edge of the network, like at a mobile base station site). Either way, there’s more complexity to effectively supporting client needs now than there was 5 years ago.</p><p>I tend to use the hyperscaler term as shorthand for a small group of very large companies that were originally cloud hosting providers that seek to apply massive scale to supply storage and compute services to the enterprise market.</p><p>But they’re also more than that. Because of the need to support both cloud and edge, increasingly these organisations are looking at how they stitch the two pieces together, i.e. through network services. Also, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that all four of Ali Baba, Amazon, Google and Microsoft has other enterprise products and services way beyond cloud and edge. What do these two trends mean for their likely impact. </p><p><> </p><p>Of those two, let’s tackle the network services piece first, i.e. the network that connects the customer, cloud and edge together.</p><p>In Episode 3 I talked about the idea of Separation>Innovation>Explosion, the idea that if you separate the hardware and software elements of a technology field then it tends to encourage lots of innovation. Specifically, I talked about it in the context of telecoms networks.</p><p>In Episode 6 I talked about 5G and how the much reduced latency creates an interesting changing dynamic for how services are delivered, encouraging more processing to take place not on the device, or in a central data center, but at the edge of the network. </p><p>These developments are of particular interest to hyperscalers, such as AWS and Microsoft, who have been showing lots of interest recently in the world of telecommunications. Recent acquisitions from Microsoft of Affirmed Networks and Metaswitch Networks point to an aggressive approach towards developing new telecommunications services in a newly disaggregated world, and both they and others including AWS have been bolstering their edge offerings.</p><p>In a recent Transforma Insights report called ‘ The Network New Normal: how web-scalers are gearing up to take advantage of 5G, edge computing and network disaggregation ’ I looked at the development from the perspective of the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Rakuten, how they have been catalysts for this change and how they might benefit.</p><p>This is the age-old story of technology evolution shifting the playing field, creating new opportunities and threats. The web-scale companies’ interest is obvious: they want greater control over delivery of their services to enterprises. Microsoft has been the most active in pursuing the opportunities presented by the Network New Normal, establishing a strong position to innovate on new networking and edge services. The AWS approach has been much more focused on working with telecommunications network operators, although its IoT offering is still somewhat competitive. In our recent Communications Service Provider IoT Peer Benchmarking report we dug quite a lot into the extent to which Verizon, and others, were establishing very close relationships with hyperscalers to build edge capabilities at Verizon sites.</p><p>Google is even more focused on being a supplier rather than competitor to the network operators in enterprise services. However, its focus on supporting cloud-based delivery of products from existing vendors to existing service providers is rather one-dimensional and risks missing out on the opportunities presented by these new developments. The company that seems to be doing the most to single-handedly blur the boundaries is Rakuten, being at once a mobile network operator, cloud services provider and telecommunications software vendor.</p><p>Substantial changes are coming to telecommunications networks, how services are delivered and by whom. We are just at the start of the shift to a Network New Normal. As part of the shift, network disaggregation/virtualisation increasingly blurs the lines between the traditional roles of infrastructure provider, network operator and cloud services provider. At the same time the delivery of network services is seeing a big change, becoming much more distributed courtesy of edge computing and 5G. These trends present opportunities and threats for all parties, but most likely creates the biggest headaches for infrastructure vendors. Network operators will have to tread carefully to avoid web-scalers dominating the market for provision of enterprise services. Consolidation, particularly involving players in different elements of the traditional value chain, will increase.</p><p><> </p><p>Clearly the need to connect and manage the relationship between the cloud and edge assets and the customer is important. But let’s not forget that these hyperscaler organisations have a wider portfolio of products and services. Ultimately one must assume that the goal is to be the dominant provider of enterprise products.</p><p>Take Microsoft, for instance. Its Azure offering is only a small element of what it might ultimately deliver to end users. It has extensive offerings in communications, ERP/CRM, collaboration, productivity tools (not least the office suite) and automation. Let’s also not forget that it is the proud owner of the LinkedIn and Github communities, both of which offer substantial opportunities for turning into enterprise service platforms in some way in future. LinkedIn, for instance, is already used extensively for HR and sales purposes and it’s easy to see how it might be integrated into software specific to recruitment or customer relationship management. Beyond that it may even be used for market intelligence, using the hive mind of LinkedIn. Or perhaps for targeted consulting, e.g. offering O365 users the opportunity to tap up a specialist in a field they are looking at for a day’s consulting. The opportunities are almost endless.</p><p>And then turning to Google, it has a 75% of the handset OS market share, and 2/3 of the browser market. In terms of the ways that people, both enterprise and consumer, interact with the world, Google is generally involved. It also has a set of enterprise software, Google Docs etc. albeit far behind Microsoft.</p><p>Amazon, which really set the ball rolling, is the one that as yet lacks this kind of position in the enterprise market. Alexa for business and Amazon WorkDocs haven’t exactly grabbed the business world by the short and curlies. It has managed to steal a march on the others for consumer hardware courtesy of Echo. But for enterprise, it’s still struggling. </p><p>All of the three companies I’ve focused on here have been active in developing capabilities for IoT, recognising that these are just another extension of the cloud-edge paradigm. The IoT device is the ultimate edge location. AWS has Greengrass, FreeRTOS and so on. Similarly Microsoft has IoT Plug & Play. What’s interesting here, is that this another example of the separation of hardware and software layers, with Microsoft or AWS software enhancing (arguably replacing) that of the industrial application.</p><p>I should also mention AI. All three of these companies are sinking substantial amounts into developing capabilities there. However, it’s worth stressing that AI is not an end in itself. It exists to serve the types of applications I’ve mentioned already here. For instance natural language processing for search, or automation of some business process.</p><p>Across Applications, Business services, Operating system and Hardware as well as cloud and edge (and probably network services in future) these three (plus about half a dozen others) will increasingly dominate end-to-end the delivery of enterprise services as well as the services themselves. It feels like we’re in for a much more concentrated business services environment. Companies that today are in a relatively strong position such as Oracle, SAP and Salesforce had better watch their backs.</p><p><> </p><p>In this episode we have focused exclusively on enterprise services. However, it would be wrong to assume that all this movement is solely focused on the enterprise opportunity. By ramping up its edge capability, Microsoft, Google and Amazon may be able to steal a march on its competitors in both gaming and personal computing. Lower latency means a better experience for Xbox Live or Stadia. It also potentially allows Surface or even Chromebook to gain ground on Apple products.</p><p>By shifting processing out of the device and to the edge Microsoft, for instance, could provide a superior experience (e.g. content storage and sharing) and lower cost (e.g. by reducing storage and/or processing capacity on the device). The PC as dumb terminal hasn’t exactly taken off in the past, but the shift to 5G with edge processing may allow Microsoft (or Amazon or Google) to turn the tables on Apple. All three companies have been looking for the next technology paradigm shift that might mean a break in Apple’s dominance. This could be it.</p><p>Next week I’m going to stick with technology vendors, but I’m more interested in the ones who haven’t been radically reshaping the world. I want to look at some of the less successful players and particularly why they’ve failed.</p><p>I hope you can join me.</p><p>Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1655216199155617585.post-30108709289068343702020-09-15T12:01:00.004+01:002020-09-15T14:51:26.721+01:00Wireless Noodle Episode 7: Which CSP is 'Queen of All She Surveys' in the Internet of Things?<p>Following on from last week's discussion on the manifold changes ongoing in the provision of connectivity, this week we delve into the key findings from some recent research from Transforma Insights on Communications Service Providers (CSPs) in IoT, which forms the basis for the report published on the 15th September '<a href="https://transformainsights.com/news/vodafone-telefonica-dt-iot-verizon-csp-iot-rankings">Communications Service Provider IoT Peer Benchmarking 2020</a>' which examines the capabilities and strategies of the top 10 global IoT connectivity providers with respect to IoT.</p><p>You can access it <a href="https://wirelessnoodle.podbean.com/e/queen-of-all-she-surveys/">here</a>, or via <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL3dpcmVsZXNzbm9vZGxlL2ZlZWQueG1s" target="_blank">Google</a> or <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wireless-noodle/id1528172104">Apple</a>.</p><p>The full transcript of the podcast is available below.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYJrQtJt_H2ZyLVBDlaYTcTmrBQcWT-aB8KQ7J7uD2uKkID5yCnmDyUg7DCO7XnHrNmzNnS381TZcZoulVKGggS8IvaxxVB04S5NCco2IbGNGdzgei3XF8PQJsVKfb2J_6TWgTODWGt_YT/s1388/Amalgamated+rating.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="859" data-original-width="1388" height="397" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYJrQtJt_H2ZyLVBDlaYTcTmrBQcWT-aB8KQ7J7uD2uKkID5yCnmDyUg7DCO7XnHrNmzNnS381TZcZoulVKGggS8IvaxxVB04S5NCco2IbGNGdzgei3XF8PQJsVKfb2J_6TWgTODWGt_YT/w640-h397/Amalgamated+rating.png" width="640" /></a><br /> <p></p><p>After last week’s discussion about changing dynamics in networks for supporting IoT, how do we rank the various communications service providers such as AT&T and Vodafone in delivering the Internet of Things?</p><p><></p><p>One of the most interesting parts of the job of an analyst is in benchmarking of the capabilities of different players. The enterprise adopters are interested in it, naturally, because they want to know who they should be working with. The vendors themselves are also always interested to understand how the match up to their peers.</p><p>Over the last few months I’ve been undertaking a substantial amount of research to complete the Transforma Insights inaugural Communication Service Provider IoT Peer Benchmarking. Specifically that’s focused on digging into the strategies and capabilities of the top 10 providers in the space. Companies like AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Telenor and Vodafone. </p><p>We looked at technical capabilities, service offerings, geographical reach and so on. </p><p>The report came out today and I’m delighted to share some of the findings from it. Firstly in terms of the key trends we’ve seen, and secondly what marks out the top vendors.</p><p><></p><p>The analysis of the strategies of these key ten players have revealed a number of interesting developments across all of the areas considered.</p><p>More independence for IoT business units</p><p>One of the more interesting trends in the last couple of years, and particularly in the last 12 months has been the increasing independence of the IoT units within the bigger operators.</p><p>For some it’s nothing new. Telenor Connexion has always been highly independent, and Aeris and KORE are completely focused on IoT, but for several of the others there has been a definite move to pull IoT out of the wider organisation. Deutsche Telekom formed DT IoT GmbH and Telefónica now has Telefónica Tech. Telia did a similar thing a few years ago with Division X. </p><p>There are strong arguments for breaking the IoT unit out from the wider organisation, mostly related to being more nimble. However, there is a counter argument that it’s very useful to have an integrated approach, supporting all of an enterprise’s needs regardless of whether they relate to IoT or more mainstream enterprise ICT services. If I work for a large enterprise, do I really want to have two conversations? </p><p>Networks go local again</p><p>I talked about this topic in the last episode. The funny thing is that after many years of taking global availability of connectivity for granted, we now find ourselves comparing coverage maps and discussing newly established roaming agreements. This feels like a regression. In reality it reflects the teething problems of a new set of very useful technologies. After years when the connectivity piece of the equation was undifferentiated, today it is again valuable to be able to stitch together a global connectivity offer. </p><p>All change for platforms and alliances</p><p>The last few years have seen a substantial evolution in CSP approaches to middleware platforms, i.e. the software that controls the activation, billing and control of the device and application. Historically for connectivity platforms, i.e. the things that managed the SIM cards, there were three options: Jasper’s Control Center, Ericsson’s DCP and Vodafone’s in-house developed GDSP. Others were available including platforms from Comarch, Huawei and ZTE. But the world broadly split between those three platforms. </p><p>Over the last few years we have seen this fragment. Increasingly, operators using third party platforms have built on them to include capabilities covering for instance eUICC, public cloud integration, device management, application enablement capability and the provision of APIs, and even data exchange, to run in parallel or as an add on to those platforms. </p><p>In part the fragmentation has been a reaction to the failure of the platform players, particularly Cisco (now owner of Jasper) to continue to enhance the offering. In particular, they have failed to spot the need for multiple variants to address diverse client needs from low cost/low touch through to highly customised requirements. Their ‘one size’ certainly hasn’t ‘fit all’. </p><p>All of this means that those operators which developed their own platform from scratch (Verizon and Vodafone) and those where the relationship with the third party platform developer was more arm’s length while maintaining their own parallel capability (DT IoT, Orange and Telefónica) are in a better position than those relying exclusively on third parties. The benefit of scale from using those third party offerings have all but disappeared due to the requirement to plug gaps and build on top of them. </p><p>In parallel with the depolarisation of the platforms space has been a similar diminishing of the importance of the ‘alliances’. Five years ago, the users of the three main platforms also broadly split between three alliances. Think airline alliances like Star Alliance. That kind of thing. Those using Jasper Control Center formed the M2M (later IoT) World Alliance, with the notable exception of AT&T. Those that used Ericsson DCP formed the Global M2M Association (GMA). The third group were those within the Vodafone partner network, some of whom made use of GDSP. The mapping between platform use and membership of an ‘alliance’ wasn’t perfect, but it was close. </p><p>Today the GMA and the MWA/IWA are more or less irrelevant. The problem was that it always proved impossible to cross-sell each others products. That’s something the airline alliances certainly could do, but these operator alliances couldn’t. They each became little more than talking shops although often the bilateral relationships between carriers proved useful.</p><p>Finally I should flag up a much more rational approach to verticals</p><p>It is notable that CSPs have reined in their ambitions with regard to vertical-specific offerings. The amount of undifferentiated direct-to-enterprise services have declined. What remains are much more targeted and market leading. The ‘me too’ offerings have been abandoned. This is hardly surprising; the markets for specific end user applications are typically much more fiercely contested and the CSPs have only thrived where they have a true differentiator. In most cases this has come from acquisition, for instance Telefónica of OnTheSpot, Vodafone of Cobra Automotive, Telia of Faltcom, or Verizon of various fleet management assets. In some cases the decision is to focus not on verticals, but on horizontal capabilities and particular types of customers, which has generally been the continuing approach of Telenor Connexion, DT IoT and Orange.</p><p><></p><p>So, the big question is, who tops the rankings. Well, there is a message that we will repeat ad nauseam: there is a no single ‘best’ company for providing connectivity in IoT. Any analysis that indicates that there is, would be extremely reductive. There will however be a ‘right’ provider (or providers) for any enterprise wishing to procure connectivity. </p><p>It is likely, but not certain, to be one of the operators listed in this report. The ten companies we cover are what we consider to be the best ‘global’ operators, most able to support connections around the world. In many cases, however, a local carrier may be equally well suited, if not better.</p><p>The deciding factors for selecting a provider of IoT connectivity should be some combination of three things:</p><p>Technical – All CSPs provide some form of IoT connectivity, but there are many other capabilities which they may or may not be able to support which might set them apart from their competitors.</p><p>Geographical – Coverage and presence are still important, and in fact arguably increasingly so. Consideration here includes indirect market access via partnerships, alliances and other commercial agreements. </p><p>Vertical – CSPs have different capabilities for addressing particular verticals, or systems integration/consulting capabilities for building solutions across multiple verticals.</p><p>In the report we put together heat maps to present our views on how the ten operators match up according to eight technical criteria, seven vertical sector capabilities and the ability to address opportunities in six regions. Clearly most operators are strong on the provision of connectivity, but with rather more variation on other capabilities. Verticals is much more of a mixed bag, with some very strong dedicated propositions and some cases where the CSP has elected to focus solely on the provision of horizontal connectivity. Geography is also, naturally, fragmented, with all operators having particular geographical focus, being naturally focused on their nominal ‘home’ regions. Aeris, AT&T and Verizon, for instance, are strongly focused on the US. Geographical coverage is also expanded by partnerships, which give significant variation in the ability to address other regions such as China.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZp16THCWC6nWo51VSxUKHVd4PKyG4jctChHaws7J8nTcuh4Y-nRyG5HaZX7PzQ-Zh-eIpOr9uDxS1vXwfAdN14x24aE4dSXfHWPBjS0JnRTXvq5PbdD2Nt_bEC-qwseibqJ6jw7Q9mrQd/s1426/heatmap.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1426" height="628" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZp16THCWC6nWo51VSxUKHVd4PKyG4jctChHaws7J8nTcuh4Y-nRyG5HaZX7PzQ-Zh-eIpOr9uDxS1vXwfAdN14x24aE4dSXfHWPBjS0JnRTXvq5PbdD2Nt_bEC-qwseibqJ6jw7Q9mrQd/w640-h628/heatmap.png" width="640" /></a></div><p>Technical capabilities is our first port of call.</p><p>The first sub-categories within Technical relate to the provision of access networks: public broadband, public narrowband, and private networks. </p><p>All of the providers listed in this report have very strong capability in the provision of public broadband connectivity, and there’s not a huge amount to choose between them. For narrowband networks, however, there’s quite a variety of strategies. Technology deployments, roaming arrangements and maturity of offering all help to score high here. High scorers in this category included AT&T, Telia and Vodafone. The final network sub-category is private networks which are attracting increasing interest from many of the companies profiled. These are typically campus-style deployments for factories, ports and similar. These have been a particular focus of Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone, all of whom have been developing strong propositions in this area. It is worth noting that 5G seems to have been a stimulus for a lot of the interest in private networks, but the majority of implementations are still using LTE. </p><p>The connectivity platform category I spoke about earlier. Strong performance here depends on having in house control and having a segmented approach, e.g. with explicit platforms for particular types of customer. Vodafone, Verizon, DT IoT and Telefonica all score well here. The other platform areas are device management, application enablement and data exchange and analytics. Here again DT IoT scores well, particularly thanks to its unique Data Intelligence Hub offer. As do Vodafone, Verizon and Telefonica, the latter having strong heritage in data analytics through its LUCA subsidiary. </p><p>The final rating is on professional services which relies on the CSP having consulting and systems integration capabilities. Some have strong capabilities in this space, most notably Deutsche Telekom via T-Systems. Others have almost non-existent capabilities, relying entirely on horizontal off-the-shelf offerings and/or partnering with third parties or customised solutions. </p><p>Our second set of capabilities are vertical</p><p>Specifically we look at how good the CSPs are at addressing what we at Transforma Insights have identified as the biggest opportunities for CSPs. In some cases the CSPs have a direct service offering, for instance Verizon’s extensive fleet management and logistics ‘Verizon Connect’ offering, Aeris’s Mobility Suite which provides a full connected vehicle offering, or Telefónica’s OnTheSpot in retail. In other cases it’s related to having the appropriate experience or constituent capabilities to provide the most complete set of tools for a third party service provider.</p><p>The most developed capabilities in each of the verticals are as follows:</p><p>Utilities: Telefónica, Telia and Verizon have the most experience in this category today by virtue of supporting extensive smart meter and grid deployments.</p><p>Connected Car: This has been a strong focus for most CSPs. Aeris’s Mobility Suite is worth calling out here as a white-label connected vehicle platform. For other CSPs the focus has been more on providing the most appropriate connectivity offering to secure a large proportion of car manufacturers. AT&T and Vodafone have been particularly strong here. Vodafone has further strong credentials through its Vodafone Automotive business unit, which provides a full set of capabilities from device through to installation. </p><p>Transportation: Verizon has made a USD3 billion bet on fleet management and associated applications. By virtue of this it has a genuinely market leading offer for end customers. Telia has also established strong credibility for its public transport offering. </p><p>Smart building: This category represents a very strong revenue opportunity but is not typically associated with wide area connectivity, therefore CSPs have largely not pursued it in an aggressive way. However, some, including Verizon, Telia and Orange are starting to make good headway.</p><p>Retail: Few CSPs have much of an offering dedicated to retail IoT. Telefónica, via its OnTheSpot acquisition is the most notable exception.</p><p>Smart Cities: Both AT&T and Verizon have been quite progressive in pursuing the smart cities space, taking the lead on developing a number of projects. The role for most other CSPs has generally been as a connectivity provider. The big exception in Europe is Telefónica, which has had some strong wins with its FI-WARE-based platform.</p><p>Industrial: This is a big focus for CSPs currently, being perceived as a sector with a natural fit with newly deployed 5G networks. Orange has a strong co-innovation approach, while Vodafone has seen some strong wins for industrial private networks.</p><p>Geographical capabilities is our final part of the equation.</p><p>The importance of geography is very closely linked to the specifics of any deployment. Some will be focused on connecting devices within a single country, such as smart metering, whereas others will involve deployments to dozens of countries worldwide, sometimes static in a single country and sometimes cycling between countries. Our main consideration in the report is global deployments, i.e. those involving several countries. All of the operators listed support global connectivity through a combination of their own networks within footprint countries and through roaming and localisation of devices on partner networks. Higher ratings for each of the six super-regions covered come from having a facilities-based network, e.g. AT&T or Verizon in the US, and after that based on roaming agreements and alliances. </p><p>Vodafone rates very high for coverage, courtesy of a strong footprint and an extensive network of partner operators. Telenor, Telefónica and DT IoT also score strongly here based on extensive partnerships and, in the case of DT, own networks in both Europe and North America. Virtual network operators KORE and Aeris score well here also, thanks to a strong heritage of securing connectivity agreements around the world. AT&T and Verizon tend to be highly focused on their own region to the exclusion of global opportunities. </p><p>Consolidated ranking</p><p>Of course, having create such a heat map, any analyst will have the overwhelming urge to apply some weightings to each of the categories and thereby create a ranking. For the technical capabilities, the highest weightings go to the public broadband and connectivity platform elements, as well as professional services. For verticals, utilities and connected car score highest. In terms of regions, based on our assessment of market value from our IoT Connected Devices forecasts, North America, Europe and China are equally split with ‘Other Asia’ approximately half as important as those three, and the other two regions half as important again. </p><p>But, I have to hold something back for <a href="https://transformainsights.com/research/reports/csp-iot-peer-benchmarking-2020">the report</a>. If you’re interested in getting hold of a copy, you can contact us at <a href="mailto:enquiries@transformainsights.com">enquiries@transformainsights.com</a>.</p><p>I’ve run through some of the thinking in looking at qualitatively who provides the best services. There is always, however, lots of interest in how many IoT connections are declared by mobile network operators, not least because it is one of the few quantitative measures of success. </p><p>If you want to take a look at the numbers, there is <a href="https://transformainsights.com/blog/top-25-csp-iot-connections">a blog post on TransformaInsights.com</a>, which shows a dynamic chart tracking the numbers of connections for the top 25 operators. It’s very pretty. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioFhAKu3VpxH6ktm_he4-PbZ1YbChy1boNvI-sWiX_1W0lBraUI_js9vB1ylv25Z_dZk9IS7DecW5XKThD1DW8YWX8nWcjt7HiC1afaclj2P2UqLazis7UzIYkqUEmIAQueLiVNhzt62Bz/s1920/Top-25-Communications-Service-Provider-ranking-2011-2019-by-IoT-connections-Transforma-Insights-Goog.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioFhAKu3VpxH6ktm_he4-PbZ1YbChy1boNvI-sWiX_1W0lBraUI_js9vB1ylv25Z_dZk9IS7DecW5XKThD1DW8YWX8nWcjt7HiC1afaclj2P2UqLazis7UzIYkqUEmIAQueLiVNhzt62Bz/s16000/Top-25-Communications-Service-Provider-ranking-2011-2019-by-IoT-connections-Transforma-Insights-Goog.gif" /></a></div><p>The biggest 33 communications service provider groups worldwide accounted for 1.27 billion cellular IoT connections at the end of 2019, up from 948 million at the end of 2018, an increase of 34%. The lion’s share of connections is accounted for by Chinese operators, which have 857 million connections, up from 605 at the end of 2018 (42% growth). The other 30 non-Chinese operators that are tracked collectively saw annual growth of 21%, from 343 million to 415 million.</p><p>Notably, Transforma Insights has reviewed and revised down the numbers of connections for the Chinese operators compared to their published figures, which were collectively over 1.2 billion at the end of 2019. There’s little disputing the dominance of the Chinese operators, but the sheer scale of reported figures naturally set alarm bells ringing for our analysts. Based on some further digging we think the real figures for what we would define as IoT connections are about 30% lower than the official stated numbers for IoT connections.</p><p>Another notable trend is the wide divergence in average-revenue-per-connection for the operators around the world. Based on limited available public data the highest was over $4 per month. The Chinese operators reported only a small fraction of that, 15-20 cents per month.</p><p>FINAL THOUGHT</p><p>We can’t reinforce enough that discussions about overarching trends and numbers of connected devices are all very well. But more important to anyone actually procuring IoT is who can best meet your requirements. If you’re a buyer of these types of services, focus on qualitative and specific. Who can do what you want them to do and has a track record of doing so. If an operator has millions of connections in a different vertical, doing different stuff, in a different place it’s nowhere near as valuable to you as a smaller niche provider who knows your area, vertical or geographical, inside out. </p><p>Next week I’m going to have a look at the so-called hyperscalers, Microsoft, Google and AWS and their strategies. It’s probably the hottest topic of the day to understand what they’re doing with regard to AI, edge computing, IoT, and a host of other disruptive technologies. Everyone is worried about them eating their lunch. Given how big these companies are and how wide their coverage, I will only be able to touch on a few areas. But it’s sure to be one we come back to.</p><p>I hope you can join me. </p><div><br /></div><p> Links to some of the research that I’ve refered to in this week’s show, as well as a transcript of the recording, will be available on the podcast website at <a href="http://WirelessNoodle.com">WirelessNoodle.com</a></p><p>Thank you for listening to The Wireless Noodle. If you would like to learn more about the research that I do on IoT, AI and more, you can follow me on Twitter at <a href="twitter.com/mattyhatton">MattyHatton</a> and you can check out <a href="transformainsights.com">TransformaInsights.com</a>. </p><p>Thanks for joining me. I’ve been Matt Hatton and you’ve been listening to the Wireless Noodle.</p><p> </p><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Matt Hattonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17137664125991234548noreply@blogger.com0