“I don’t have any one-liners for you this time,” says Wienke Giezeman, almost apologetically, as if our periodic chats about the state of the IoT market are supposed to produce zingers and humdingers, and headlines that write themselves. Which they aren’t, even if they normally do (check the archives). “It is really just about the hard work now,” he says, settling into a discourse that tells of an industry that is older, wiser, and also tougher (stauncher) than it ever was.
Except he can’t help himself. “That is how the market climbs this slope of productivity. That is how it goes beyond the hype – and gets away from all these crazy announcements you’re addicted to, about getting rich in massive IoT. It is about small steps, consistently in the same direction.” Some mild offence is taken; a little snort is given. No we are not, comes the response from RCR Wireless. We are the only ones still interested in the narrative minutiae about how IoT matters, succeeds, and pays-off.
But whatever; the real joke in IoT is that it was ever going to be easy; the real joke is on those who crashed and burned. It doesn’t require a punchline; tragedy and comedy abound, and yet there is some real hard-won promise of a happy ending as well. This appears to be about the sum of things, as Giezeman, co-founder and chief executive at The Things Industries (TTI), does some mental prep, effectively, on the hoof, ahead of his keynote at The Things Conference in Amsterdam later this month (September 25-26).
The message to the low-power wide-area (LPWA) end of the IoT market in the Dutch capital is going to be about “steady growth”, and about a broader “loss of ignorance”, he says. But growth for TTI, in terms of traffic on its LoRaWAN network server, sounds better than steady: up 60 percent since the last conference, says Giezeman, to 2.3-2.4 million devices. “Which is insane in IoT, right? It’s almost a million devices in a year. But imagine the work that goes into that – in cost-of-ownership, in order to scale.” A lot – is the point he is trying to make. And recognition of this hard graft – of shared risk, shared reward – has brought about this loss of ignorance (innocence?) in the market.
So he reckons, and so he will tell the Amsterdam shindig at the end of the month. It might feel like a more modest outlook, which does not grab headlines like the grand-standing in the sector a couple of years back; but Giezeman’s explanation of the post-hype era in massive IoT still catches the attention (and will make a good headline, in the end). “That is what I am saying,” he says, in response to the RCR protest, that we have called BS on the IoT hype-cycle at every turn.
“Exactly. It is marginal-gains, in the right direction. Exponential growth comes as that cascades through the ecosystem. That is the only way to get these hockey sticks, right? Which is the great paradox. Because hockey-stick growth is what the VC dream of IoT was all about. But hard work and vision – and time – is the only way to achieve it. It isn’t the get-rich-quick dream of IoT, even if the end result – an IoT platform, in our case, serving 50 verticals in 50 countries – is the same.”
This is what maturity (a loss of innocence / “ignorance”) looks like in a fragmented market, he says. “The market has lost its ignorance. Because IoT is hard, right? Everyone knows you fail, and then learn, and learn to manage the risk. We used to talk about ROI, which is how the conversation starts. But the industry has gone beyond that. There are so many examples of successful IoT projects. ROI is not the challenging part anymore,” he says.
“People know about the ROI that IoT can bring – and the ROI it can’t bring, as well. The question is how to drive down the total cost-of-ownership (TCO) so it scales, and how to build concurrency to drive down the time-to-value (TTV) – to roll a solution out at pace to all kinds of venues. Those are the challenges, now; that’s what we are talking about in Amsterdam. Which sounds kind of boring, maybe, but reflects the real maturity in the market.”
Actually, these are familiar challenges, discussed in these pages all the time; consecutive tasks to understand a business problem, devise a technology solution, and plot a financial return are only ever revised and repeated – effectively ad infinitum – following the first implementation of a new technology, or solution, or use case. That is how industrial change flows, and revolution spreads; it is the same for the private 5G brigade, flirting with intent at the higher-power end of the IoT game.
It is just that 5G-IoT, at the edge for local-area monitoring and at large for wide-area tracking, is some years behind LPWA-IoT in terms of its vendor-side collaboration and user-side engagement – and all the problem solving, solution development, and money making, to be discussed by 1,000-odd delegates at The Things Conference in a couple of weeks. And where these pages used to talk about technology wars and ‘massive’ scale, there is now a sense of clearer purpose.
The bluster has cleared, suggests RCR Wireless. No one talks about any of that stuff anymore. IoT is an accepted part of the toolbox, if you like; referenced everywhere, as a part of the fabric of everyday digital-change initiatives. But it does not make the headlines, by itself, in the same way; the big talk has died down; the jeopardy in the hype narrative has abated. “The hype was only really about these companies that thought they would take it all.” responds Giezeman.
“It was about venture money and the next tech billionaire, and getting a story into the press to raise more funds. But the pie is being divided up – between different companies across the whole ecosystem. Which has always been our mantra – to ‘build this thing together’. It turned out we were right, along with everyone else who is still in this game.” The new peace between old warriors in the IoT market might be perceived in the delegate list in Amsterdam, he suggests.
“There are all different kinds of IoT technology providers at our conference. It’s not just the LoRa crowd,” he says, mentioning traditional cellular hardware makers like Blues and Nordic Semiconductor, among others, and pointing towards the hybrid multi-RAT crossover solutions to be discussed on the agenda. And what about TTI? A late chance to plug the host firm; how exactly is TTI making the TCO and the TTV, and the TTM and so on, easier for everyone? Is it easier?
“Exponentially so, yes,” he responds. “Ours is a global SaaS platform; a LoRaWAN network server, or a network core, as the cellular crowd would call it. Which only requires some gateways and sensors, and 90 percent of the solution is done. So it works almost like a one-size-fits-all platform, with just a little tailoring on top. Except that, in IoT, ultimately, one-size-fits-all is a wrong term. But it is like a generic platform, which the developer can fit with the right ecosystem components
He goes on: “It integrates easily with any platforms and devices, and incorporates tools to automate network settings and optimise power efficiencies, and all these kinds of things. It takes away all of that friction for the developer, and provides encryption and integration with IoT or ERP systems, and removes the hassle and cost of running on a local server. All of which makes the IoT solution easier to build and maintain – because of all the network management tools in there.
“Which is about the TCO, in the end. So the developer spends as little time as possible on the IoT network and as much time as possible on the IoT solution, and making sure the data that comes out of it is processed and presented in the best way for customers. And with us, we have 10 people always working to deliver a better product every four or five weeks – to make it two percent better, say, every month. Which means a cadence of constant innovation, and improvement.”
The Things Conference is in Amsterdam on September 25-26; see here for details.
