Some kind of “niche-within-a-niche” reality emerged at The Things Conference in Amsterdam this week – about an IoT opportunity that is fragmented but also promising, and within reach. Growth within the LoRaWAN sector, and useful cross-tech collaboration and specialist enterprise know-how suggest IoT is finding its rhythm, and starting to scale beyond hype.
A niche within a niche within a niche – was the message, at the top of the agenda, at The Things Conference in Amsterdam this week (September 23 and 24). It is both the problem with IoT, and also the solution – about how to reach this mythical promised land of ‘massive IoT’, where the whole planet is patched with sensors, and everyone makes money, and maybe the world is better for it. Of course, it won’t just happen suddenly, if at all.
But the crowd gathered (and expanded) here for the annual IoT shindig hosted by The Things People, the LoRaWAN collective in charge of The Things Network and The Things Industries, still believe. And there is a sense – possibly heightened because of the bubble effect at such a buzzy event, and because the Dutch group’s tenth birthday has prompted some self-reflection – that something has shifted in the IoT market; like it knows what success looks like.
Finally. Which is not to say that anyone in Amsterdam thinks IoT is easy, suddenly; very clearly, it is still hard going – a fragmented customer market served by a fragmented supplier market, which is required to stitch constrained low-margin solutions together from disparate low-maintenance parts for sub-segments within sub-segments. The point Wienke Giezeman was making in the opening keynote was that even these sub-niches hold fantastic potential.
“There are a million different niches in IoT. Take facilities management – within that niche, there is a niche focused just on fridge monitoring. And just in the US – so a niche within a niche within a niche – there are eight billion commercial fridges, which all need temperature-monitoring,” he said, swerving in and out of a potted history of his own company (for its birthday, and for all the new delegates, joining for the first time from parallel IoT factions.)
The audio cracked, the tape corrupted; somehow, with some envelope maths, Giezeman turned this eight-billion fridge count into a four-billion “IoT opportunity” – for a single application, within a single use case, within a single geography. The numbers aren’t really important, except that they are big – as they were always predicted to be. “This is the source of some of the hype years ago, maybe, but this potential is still there,” he said.
And the numbers from this show sound impressive. Giezeman and co drew a crowd of 2,000 from 70 countries to the old Kromhout Motoren Fabriek on the waterfront, and served up a high-quality Industry 4.0 maker-menu across three stages, a bunch of workshop rooms, and a busy and buzzy showfloor. “Fifty percent more partners, 80 percent more visitors, 80 percent more content.” The best bit about the show stats was that the influx was from parallel IoT sectors.
Alliances and interest groups from the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Z-WAVE, and Wi-SUN communities were sprinkled through the mix – in the presentations, panels, workshops. Their members were on the stands. The cellular IoT community was well represented – by chip makers and module makers, if not by operators themselves. Qualcomm, whose new Edge Impulse business has been coming for years, was a headline sponsor.
There were other contingents, too: the Arduino Community, IoT Eclipse Foundation, Zephyr Project, Edge AI Foundation. The most inconspicuous absence was Unabiz / Sigfox, the single biggest non-cellular LPWAN-IoT business out there (in terms of customer devices) – with 15 million connections (versus 10 million, maybe, for the biggest IoT provider in the LoRaWAN space). Of course, Sigfox has its reasons.
It will emerge in a couple of months with a new structure or a new buyer; but its appearance here would have been a neat one, and perhaps served it well – to make a proper show in Amsterdam where the newly grown-up IoT market has buried its IoT hatchet(s), and promised to get along, and pick up the pieces to deliver integrated solutions where different connectivity technologies fail (differently). In the meantime, it was over to the others – and mostly to the LoRaWAN market, inevitably.
The Things Industries serves around 1,500 customers in various industries; its core product, a LoRaWAN network server platform called The Things Stack, supports 3.8 million devices, across about 500 “different types of solutions”, said Giezeman. It hosts around 4,000 messages per second, apparently – which sounds like a lot of a little, but is actually a lot, said Johan Stokking, Giezeman’s partner, in the same keynote.
“These are all low-power end-devices; they send very little data – only a few messages per hour, on average.” So it takes a lot of them to produce such a flood of data – is the proof-point for the hosts. Revenue is growing / grew at 30 percent per annum, and is recurring from “1,500 customers”, said Giezeman – which is the same as its total customer count, if quoted correctly above. Most interesting: the largest contributes “no more than two percent”.
But these are highs from the keynote; there is evidence, elsewhere, that this low-power end of the IoT market is finding its rhythm, finally. There are 125 million LoRaWAN connections in total, said the LoRa Alliance. “The curve is bending upwards,” said Alper Yegin, chair of the group, in discussion with RCR Wireless. German meter specialist ZENNER has 10 million of them; a bunch of others, like The Things Industries, are around the five-million mark.
The community has variously signed major new supply deals with Chevron, Rentokil, Shell, Starbucks, Total Energies, to list a few – attached to either private or public LoRaWAN networks. RCR Wireless will bring coverage from various talks at the show, including with Yegin. But the whole niche-within-a-niche shtick is interesting as well because it is not just a repeat message about how big the IoT opportunity is, but about how it is now being captured.
Which is the hard lesson the IoT sub-sector, and the LoRaWAN sub-sector within it, has learned over five years – and which the private 5G and the industrial AI markets, some years behind, going up and down either side of the hype curve, could do with learning. Fast. Because the hard part with Industry 4.0 is not just to “solve problems” – which gets presented, even here, in vanilla management-speak like some kind of eureka moment (“don’t sell technology”) – but to know how to do it.
Which means engaging specialist enterprise channels, understanding specialist enterprise problems, and building specialist enterprise solutions. The enterprise sector, especially the OT-end of it, is too broadly and deeply complicated for easy cookie-cutter blueprints and off-the-shelf products, of the sort that big mobile operators box-shift with airtime subscriptions for phones, cars, meters. The Amsterdam crowd has this specialist vertical know-how, or else knows how to find it – and has the hard-won experience to concoct solutions that work accordingly.
Which is why, maybe, the niche-within-a-niche message is hopeful: because it is big, and it is also within reach.
