How to Succeed in IoT Implementations: Keep It Real, Keep It Open, Keep It Agnostic

A lot of IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT) companies, especially those with platforms, call their technology agnostic, and for good reason. As hundreds of platforms, protocols, sensors, devices, clouds, applications and edge approaches shake out, agnostic sounds like an insurance policy against technologies that may lead to end-of-life or be otherwise unsupportable. Putting in connected systems is analogous to putting elevators into high rise buildings: they are not easy to rip and replace. Hanging onto proprietary solutions may make sense when companies wish to compete and raise funds to do so, but as the recent announcement by IBM that they are acquiring Red Hat (for $33 Billion) makes clear, open source was not a science experiment twenty years ago – it represented a sea-change for the tech world.The mandates by Tier One communications service providers, including Verizon and AT&T in the US, to move to Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and offer network infrastructure that runs on any appropriate bare metal server is another big hint that there will not be a future for vendors who only offer proprietary hardware/software solutions, which has thrown big companies like Cisco, Ericsson and others into chaos, and has forced them to likewise acquire software companies and talent in order to comply with their largest customers’ mandates.