Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor, and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
The “Internet of Things” continues to garner daily press attention, an ever-increasing number of industry events and new companies entering the market, yet it seems to be stuck at the phase of an early-adopter technology. Even after years of discussion under various versions of terminology.
I recently spoke with Bernhard Huessy, co-founder and CEO of nomos system AG to discuss IoT and the company’s role in that market. We talked about what is needed in the industry to migrate IoT to a wider level of adoption.
“IoT will become obsolete if people don’t use it,” said Huessy.
Although that sounds like an obvious statement, it’s an important fact that we quite often tend to skip in the world of tech. Companies get so wound up in their technology, they sometimes miss the relevance to their potential users. These users need to not only understand why the technology is relevant to them, they need to be able to purchase it from a location that fits with the way they think about and shop for solutions to their problems.
Huessy walked me through the following scenario: Say I like to cook pasta with basil and I want a plant sensor to help me keep my basil healthy and watered. Today I would likely have to buy that solution in an electronics store, but that might not be a place I am comfortable shopping for this type of product. I want to go to the plant store, where I buy my basil plants, and talk to someone who understands plants, not someone who understands sensors. Makes sense to me.
IoT will not be a one-size-fits-all world and it will require devices to talk to each other that might not all speak the same language. It will likely be deployed as a combination of managed services, inexpensive do-it-yourself products and more complex customized solutions. nomos offers a universal automation-software engine to control any device, regardless of communication protocol, standards or proprietary software. This is achieved by elevating software and hardware to a single communication layer. 
There are three products available to support the overall solution. The ABCs of IoT become easier with the company’s solutions. The first is product A: the Easy IoT package, a white label product that can be provided with or without the IoT hardware and can support home automation, lighting or security. The solution allows for custom branding by the service provider offering an end-user solution. The second is product B: a development platform that lets service providers build their own customized solutions and interoperate with third-party devices. And lastly, product C: a systems integrator tool enabling further customization of offers.
N?omos was founded by home-automation experts and currently boasts over 2,000 projects and 500 system integrations. These projects are in Europe, the United States and Asia, and include residential, enterprise, automotive, aviation and marine commercial projects.
The potential for IoT to change the way we all live and work is immense. The analyst projections are staggering for the amount of revenue generation expected from this market. To reach this potential we need to go beyond the enterprise applications and reach the consumer world in a way that is meaningful. Are you solving a problem I believe needs to be solved? Are you doing it in a way that works for me financially? Is someone there to help me when it doesn’t work? I really hope as an industry we don’t forget these three key factors.
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