Channel Carves Out a Role in IoT World
Channel executives at IoT World see signs of a maturing commercial and industrial internet-of-things market.
![Avnet's Lou Lutostanski at IoT World 2018 Avnet's Lou Lutostanski at IoT World 2018](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltf3525b51c29b10e1/65261d66bbb3387a9dcc8434/Lou-Lutostanski-Avnet-IoT-World-2018.jpg?width=1280&auto=webp&quality=95&format=jpg&disable=upscale)
(Pictured above: Avnet’s Lou Lutostanski on stage at IoT World in Santa Clara, California, May 15, 2018.)
IOT WORLD — A giant tech storm called the internet of things (IoT) has been building off the coast of commercial and industrial markets, and now it’s finally looking to make landfall. At least this was the theme at IoT World in Silicon Valley this week.
For systems integrators, high margins await those that can help companies get ahead.
“There was a lot of interest in industrial IoT at this year’s event,” says Terje Gloerstad, CTO at AuthorityData, an IoT integrator specializing in the insurance industry. “That’s where you’ll see the big contracts, long-term deployments, where most of the money is going to be made.”
Signs of a maturing industrial IoT market came into sharp focus during the wee morning of the first full day at IoT World. That’s when Charles Reed Anderson & Associates, an IoT advisory services firm, unveiled its latest research showing that senior managers (just below the C-suite) are starting to see what IoT can do for them.
Charles Reed Anderson found that only 14 percent of executives say lack of senior management support is their top IoT implementation challenge; in years past, this was often cited as the biggest hurdle, Gloerstad says.
In fact, the IoT landscape is littered with failed pilot projects that didn’t have senior management buy-in — that is, many were funded by the innovation team, not the line-of-business executive with profit-and-loss responsibility.
“The C-suite is maybe nine months to a year ahead of the rest of the company,” Gloerstad says. “But you’re starting to see use cases with clear value propositions, ROI on implementations, maturing market vendors, and senior management starting to understand the value that IoT can bring.”
Terje Gloerstad
Terje Gloerstad
In another sign of maturing times, U.S. companies have turned their gaze from sexy hardware to serious analytics. They’ve figured out that IoT isn’t about the connected device so much as the data, analytics and insights gained from it.
Compare this to their Asian counterparts that lag behind.
In an Ecosystm and Charles Reed Anderson survey on the preferred IoT partner for future projects, nearly one-third (32 percent) of U.S. executives chose analytics vendors. When including Asian executives, that number was only 18 percent. Ten percent of U.S. executives surveyed chose hardware vendors, but that number was 21 percent when Asian execs were included.