Top Five Considerations When Choosing an IoT Platform

Whether you trace the beginning of the Internet of Things (IoT) to ARPANET in 1969 or John Romkey's toaster that turned on and off over the Internet at the October 1989 INTEROP conference or the coining of the Internet of Things term by Kevin Ashton in 1999, it's clear that here in 2019, the IoT industry has progressed far beyond its early promise. Today, we have voice-controlled smart-home devices, early versions of autonomous vehicles including flying taxis and even self-driving luggage and a growing range of sophisticated enterprise IoT and industrial IoT (IIoT) products. Retailers and product brands are jumping on the IoT bandwagon, and telecommunications and communications service providers are taking consumer IoT to the next level. The new IoT trends, technologies and channels are driving tremendous excitement. Everyone wants in on the game. We're officially neck deep in the hype phase of IoT. But the evolution of IoT also points to a looming problem: all these diverse sources for IoT solutions are competing to become the center of the IoT universe. Differentiating themselves from one another means settling into distinct silos. And silos are the enemy of IoT adoption. After all, the user expectation is that IoT is one single, interconnected and all-encompassing experience with every connected device connected to every other connected device. It's not an unreasonable expectation, given the promises made about seamless IoT operations.