3 Challenges with IoT
First off, IoT has Manny challenges, and many more ahead. Here, I have captured three of the top issues we see as an IoT consultancy and honestly why we have started on the mission to fix it. We believe the Internet of Things has an amazingly bright future and it’s already showing itself in many companies who have adapted to this changing landscape and adopted IoT. If you are a decision maker, IT professional, business owner or just someone that is interested in IoT I encourage you to subscribe to our email newsletter.
1) Getting your data
Getting data from the physical world to the digital one, you would not think that’s an issue with the ’Internet of Things’ as it has ‘internet’ in the name! In fact, this is a very common issue, and we see it all the time, just the act of getting sensor data to the cloud is a pain. Companies normally don’t think about “How am I going to get my data to the internet?” They take that for granted because hello “Internet of Things”! Companies often have issues with integration with some of the bigger IoT brokers out there. The lack of explanation or documentation on how to get your data from point A to point B is left mostly to you. You often times are not able to use libraries or packages you are familiar with, leaving you to rely on the platforms ability to document and maintain said package. As a company building and launching a new or existing product, this is a huge headache, I am sure your developers and product team will agree.
We make this more comfortable for you and your team. We say, “why not use libraries and packages you are most familiar with?” Echolo uses a lightweight messaging broker that is compatible with all Message Queue Telemetry Transport libraries and packages. While Echolo does maintain and build its own SDK’s that you can use, we do not require you to do so. We don’t like to be forced, so why should we do that to you?
2) Complexity Meltdown
IoT is complex, and often times researching new items on IoT only leads you into more complexity. The amount of knowledge available and the ever-changing nature of IoT and technology as a whole can lead to a complexity meltdown! The Internet of Things should not be this hard. IoT in it’s simplest form is just;
- Physical sensors or devices sending data to the cloud.
- A decision can be made by a person or other computer system
In some cases that may be another physical device! Yes, IoT can get much more complex than that but often times this simple explanation is the one that drives most of the products and solutions today. This also is what most companies first see as a huge ROI, by simply automating things.
IoT platforms play a huge role in your product, they are overlooked and not given the thought until the last. When choosing to go with other platforms or brokers companies struggle with getting data routed and often get to a point where they find out that only one-third of the actual work is done for them. For companies with no development team or little to no IoT platform experience, this leaves them at a dead end quickly. This is because, most IoT brokers or platforms often only take one step for you, they allow you to send data in, but getting it out is all on you, again if your a company that has little to no experience with IoT platforms this is a huge undertaking that is about to add months to your timeline.
This slowdown or complete miss by other platforms is what Echolo set out to solve. We want to get your product or solution out the door quickly. Your customers are waiting and so is your bottom line. We did not stop at the first or even second step in the IoT process. Echolo makes getting your data to your application easy and uses traditional methods along with new ones, which most developers are familiar with. Our comprehensive documentation, Restful API’s, webhooks and sockets allow you to plugin your application with ease.
3) Lack of IoT Understanding
Even in 2018 most business still, do not understand how to implement IoT and how to make it work for them. Heck, even a lot of technical people along with developers don’t understand the importance or impact of IoT. Companies are often concerned that their employees lack IoT skills and knowledge, along with senior managers lacking knowledge of, and a commitment to, the required technologies to succeed with an IoT strategy.
The Internet of Things is often a nebulous idea and people have a hard time wrapping their brain around use cases and how to inject this into there existing problems. In fact, 70% of companies often look to outside consultants or IoT companies like Echolo for help or try to learn from early movers in similar markets. When companies look to secure outside help they tend to be more successful and reach the market faster. Consultants like Echolo have often seen the pitfalls and can help identify issues early because of the experience they already had with launching IoT based solutions.
Don’t have a development team?
There has been a lot of talk about developers and technical teams. Not to worry, Echolo is here to help, we offer professional services from hardware to software development. We can help get you that last mile so your product is not left on the side of the road!
