Ten years old today (August 21), Netherlands-based LoRaWAN outfit The Things Industries appears to be thriving in a complex, fragmented, and weirdly twisted IoT market. Wienke Giezman, the company’s co-founder, blows out some candles.
In sum – what to know:
Decade journey – Dutch LoRaWAN collective TTI is 10 – having gone from a hobbyist IoT startup in Amsterdam to a multi-million IoT champ for the global market.
Reality vs hype – its open-handed anti-BS pragmatism has served it well, as marketing hype and get-rich crusades have given way to a more equitable IoT ecosystem.
Technology wars – are over, says co-chief Giezeman, promoting diverse and interoperable IoT technologies to collectively solve real-world problems.
“Those guys had no idea how to make money from IoT,” says Wienke Giezeman, chief executive and co-founder at The Things Industries (TTI), the well-liked Dutch IoT collective with a well-used cloud IoT server for an increasingly well-ordered global IoT community. “And they never pretended they did,” he adds. He is referring to an image (see below), a little fuzzy, which looks like it is from a different era. It tells you a lot about Giezeman and co, and something about the IoT market in general: that this was always a speculative pursuit and a team-sport; that clear answers are hard to come by and the best solutions are crowd-sourced.
Oh, and that straight-talking (see here and here, for example) gets you a long way, maybe.
Giezeman is celebrating a birthday; hence the old photos, and the slight reverie. Except it is not his own, exactly; the little upstart start-up firm he founded for a hobbyist local LoRaWAN community in Amsterdam with his business partner, Johan Stokking, is 10 years old already – today, actually (August 21) – and all grown-up. From an open-ended Meetup invite for a makers conference in the Dutch capital in 2015 to an open-handed aristocrat on the global IoT scene in 2025, the pair have appeared like an advert for pragmatic and democratic IoT development.
The business – actually founded as The Things Network (TTN), the enduring open-source community project and one-time public network enterprise – now has 30 staff and an annual revenue of €4 million, growing 30 percent per year, apparently. The company is profitable, he says; it invests €3 million of its annual takings back into R&D – to “stay ahead in the LoRaWAN market”. Some 300,000 developers have “played, tinkered, failed, and succeeded” with its tools over the last decade, he says. It has 1,500 customers, including “at least” 50 Fortune 500 firms.
The group’s annual shindig, The Things Conference, now draws 1,500 delegates. The keynote agenda and exhibitor list at this year’s event (September 23-24) say it is no longer just a big LoRa roadshow: Qualcomm is a platinum sponsor, Nordic Semiconductor is a gold sponsor; the Bluetooth SIG, Wi-Fi Alliance, and Z-Wave Alliance have ‘community’ spots; Bosh, Infineon, NXP, and Siemens are variously involved; there are cellular IoT hardware makers everywhere you look; plus Zigbee, Matter, and Wirepas reps, and a bunch from the satellite IoT brigade (of course).
“The technology crusades and the technology wars are over,” says Giezeman. “In the end, our partners and their customers pick the technology that works for them. Which is why we have opened up for all these horizontal technologies, and why the whole IoT world is coming to Amsterdam next month.”
Hype curve
So, what are you going to tell them? What’s the big conclusion – 10 years later? “If you generalise any kind of success over a long period, you just end up with cliches,” he laughs. “Really, it has just been about that developer-focus, from the start.”
He goes on: “It is about staying close to the people that use our products – and after that, making sure the cost of ownership is manageable. They are simple things. We have not over-engineered, overspent, over-promised – and sought to align with the real maturity of the market. And to have the balls to try new things – which also means knowing when things don’t work, and keeping the good bits and chucking the rest.” It is interesting, this idea about the “real maturity of the market” – like the sector has been hobbled by a parallel tale about its fake maturity.
Indeed, that is the point; it is a narrative hype curve, as Gartner coined the term. “It is not really about the market; it is about the perception of the market. If you are going to raise a lot of money, then you are going to make a lot of promises, and do a lot of marketing – to say you’re further ahead than you really are. Whereas we did the opposite – from the first week, the first conference. We got hands-on, and saw these IoT devices were falling apart – and that a lot of pieces of the puzzle still needed to mature from a tech perspective, as well as just from a corporate one.
Giezeman and Stokking had only met over coffee a couple of months earlier. “We discussed how we wanted to build a business, and how we loved the open-source mindset. And then we ran into this LoRaWAN.” But August 21, 2015: it was also clear the IoT industry was nascent, and not really ready – even as Cisco’s notorious hype-piling forecast about 50 billion IoT devices by 2020 was only four years old at the time. “As an organization, we aligned with that maturity [and not the hype curve]. And the perception, then, was we were just experimenters and hobbyists.
“But everybody was a hobbyist, then; even the large companies were experimenting with IoT. It was no different to an IoT developer in a garage at home. And as the market has grown since, we have grown with it, and we have retained that connection with the original developer market, and with the people that are really building IoT solutions. Because you need to be built in the first place.” You can see where Giezeman’s marketing catchphrases come from, of course – notably the one about, ‘let’s build this together’. It has always been a team sport for Giezeman and Stokking.
Fail fast
Which is an idea they had from the start, which has become an ethos also through trial and error. Fail fast, live long, and build a happy IoT business – or something like; we are mixing management hokum and pop cliche. The point is, the pair have tried and failed, over a decade, and kept the good bits in between. “We did everything, too – public LoRaWAN, private LoRaWAN, anyway-you-want LoRaWAN. And what we see now is that low-power LAN, rather than WAN, is where LoRa works best – so it is LPLAN, LoRaLAN – in smart buildings, smart metering, industrial IoT.”
Giezeman goes on: “We tried to make money with lots of stuff – with hardware and software. And in the end we found what we are good at – which is building global cloud servers. To make a sustainable and growing business, we had to move into cloud management for LoRaWAN, and operate at a global scale. Because it is $5-$10 on a $300 IoT solution. But we are exposed to 300,000 developers, which have all tried stuff, and all kept the good bits. So that’s the good bit, which stuck for us. It is easy to say; you have to be prepared to fail. But this was a market where all you could do was explore – and the more you explored, the more you learned, and the more things worked.”
So what did you leave behind? What didn’t work? “Selling hardware, selling solutions, selling consultancy, selling loads of stuff – to focus on the one bit that we are really good at. And if everybody does the one thing they’re good at, and makes sure they’re interoperable with everyone else, all doing things they’re good at, then you build this thing together.” Bingo. But it goes for the mega-scale service providers, as well – the likes of AWS and Microsoft, which have reduced their rosters of IoT applications over the past 12 months.
Giezeman responds: “They are billion dollar companies, so they are kind of different beasts. But actually, yeah, you’re right – the thing they are good at is building globally scalable cloud services and, for them, IoT was too fragmented and hard to scale. Which is why they all pulled back.” But what about this lengthening list of module makers, all focused on cellular hardware, and all engaged in sales or fire sales, or searches for new buyers? “It means the expectation was bigger than the reality, and the whole write-off has come really late, to be honest.”
It is a symptom, he argues, of a part of the IoT market – whether cellular (NB-IoT, LTE-M) or non-cellular (LoRaWAN, Sigfox) – that figured IoT connectivity could be mapped and scaled into a single public global network, whether through purchase deals or roaming deals, in order to take an out-sized slice of an out-sized pie. “That has been very overestimated,” he says. “And cellular IoT is not about private networks, mostly – it is mostly WAN. Which is why there is all this consolidation.”
In the end
At the same time, the pie is piping hot and packed with berries, even if it is smaller.
“Indeed, IoT has become a line item; it is just a tool,” he says. But to make it palatable, all the ingredients have to combine. Which comes back to this logic about opening The Things Conference to horizontal tech players, whatever their tech provenance. “We have one product that serves a thousand different use cases with 1,500 different customers. It is very scalable. We have stuck closely to the standards, and open-sourced the rest. We are not doing solutions, we are not doing devices; we are not competing with our customers. It is a horizontal service.”
He adds: “If you want to build an IoT stack – from device to gateway, to server to platform – then all the pieces have to play together. We invest a lot of time and money to make sure even a device that we have never seen still works – that the data flows; that everything works out of the box. Which is hard to do because we can’t influence what the device maker is doing. But we have become such an authority in the LoRaWAN ecosystem that everybody creating a LoRaWAN device will always test on our platform.”
Same question, again: what is the message going to be next month – now the tech wars are done, and old enemies join together in Amsterdam to share a conference stage and an exhibition hall? What’s the conclusion, after 10 years at the sharp end of IoT? He responds: “That there was never a technology war. There was a marketing war. That is the conclusion; that all these technologies are different, and solve different problems. But the marketing drove promises, which confused customers. And at some point, tech evangelism became a tech crusade.
“So this is, now, about un-confusing the market – to say, hey, LoRaWAN does not compete with cellular IoT. Because I am 100 percent sure the industry thought Semtech and Nordic, both at our event next month, were competitors – before the Sierra Wireless thing. Bluetooth and LoRa are not competing. Wi-Fi HaLow is not competing; Z-Wave Long Range is not competing. These all solve different technical problems. It is up to the whole IoT industry to build the solution – and to build this whole thing together.”
And in 10 years? Where will Giezeman and Stokking and the TTI crew be then? “Doing more of the same – supporting more IoT technologies and making it easier for more businesses to adopt IoT.”
