In the current market research trend there a leaders across various IoT industries setting trends for how companies can start utilizing IoT, and how. Current leaders in the Internet of Things platform market consist IBM, PTC, GE, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services. How do you choose a platform for your company? Consider this criteria:
Connectivity: A platform will have the capability to create and offer management for communication from a device, to the platform. Consider what communication options are supported by the IoT platforms, these can be broke down into these categories for itself:
- Long Range: Low power radio transmissions, cell networks, or satellite these would enable devices to have over the air communication.
- Close Range: Zigbee, Z-Wave, WiFi, Bluetooth.
- Specialized Protocols: MQTT, CoAP, XMPP
Security: IoT is always pressured from all side with security leaks, and flaws. There has been numerous postings about how devices are being hacked, or transmissions captured. Securing the communication between device, and backend is a big priority. Security features that IoT platforms are incorporating to ensure protection are with network connectivity, authentication, identity management, data loss preventing, device management.
Manageability: Platforms consider the capability of device operation, provisioning, and handling maintenance of IoT devices. When there are hundreds, or even thousands of devices to manage the connection, and incoming data a platform will need to ability to handle and scale to these devices. Offering the ability to monitor, utilize testing, updates, and troubleshooting as an all in one solution is a key ingredient for IoT platform solutions.
Analytics: Today’s market will rarely offering analytics on real time data, or the ability to evaluate and transform captured sensor data. IoT Analytics should offer the capabilities for users to easily capture this data, and view it. Vendors like IBM Watson, and Amazon offer predictive analysis for data being captured, which offering even further information on customers, or condition of purchased assets like machinery.
Development: With diversity from a IoT platform the capability to wrap all of the functions into an application for internal or external use becomes primary reason on how to expose analytics and data. IoT platforms offering an easy way to enable developers to simplify code creation, business rules, and data management for the criteria we covered today becomes a key point for any offering. Combining development tools and API Management tools to interface with your internal Enterprise applications, such as CA, Mulesoft, Apigee, IBM, or Amazon into one platform becomes a wholesome solution for IoT.
