“NO SINGLE VENDOR WILL BE ABLE TO PROVIDE END TO END IOT SOLUTION”

While advising CIOs on how to address the challenges around IoT and edge computing, Santhosh Rao, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner, spoke to Amit Singh about customer expectations and awareness around the technology

What are the customer expectations and awareness around IoT and edge computing in India?

Many Indian enterprises today understand the impact of IoT technologies on their business. Although organizations are currently underprepared to embrace IoT due to the lack of infrastructure, the fact that end-user organizations are today asking questions about how to prepare for IoT, or start IoT implementation in their organizations, is proof enough that this technology is gaining momentum.

During 2016, many Indian organizations undertook a variety of IoT pilot projects to understand the real business benefits. However, in 2017 and 2018, they are likely to focus more on putting in place the appropriate infrastructure required to help them take those pilot projects across the organization. As a result, we may see a mild dip in the number of pilot projects, but the focus on core technology infrastructure transformation in Indian organizations will continue to be driven by IoT. Many organizations may also fail to see the business benefits because of the wrong choice of use cases that they originally started with.

Given the nascent stage of IoT and edge computing market in India, what is your advice to CIOs to build robust infrastructure?

The IoT and edge computing market in India is nascent but rapidly evolving. Digital business initiatives may require the sorting, converting, processing and consuming of data outside the traditional, centralized data center (i.e., near the source and the users of such data) — thus, the need for edge computing solutions. When deployed as part of IoT projects, edge computing provides near-real-time insights and facilitates localized actions.

Presently, hardware OEMs, analytics vendors, OT vendors, telecommunications vendors, vertical-specific emerging vendors and cloud vendors are all exploring partnerships to create pre-validated end-to-end edge computing solutions. Most of these partnerships are opportunistic in nature and therefore have a direct bearing on the success or failure of IoT projects currently being executed.  CIOs are advised to work with system integrators to build and operate the solution, initially to offset vendor insolvency risks, to address the challenges of lack of skills available in-house and to satisfy unique edge computing requirements that may require a do-it-yourself approach.

How are the vendors gearing up for their solutions around IoT and edge computing? How is the landscape changing with the M&A activities in this space?

No single vendor will be able to provide an end to end IoT solution. Most vendors today go to market by collaborating with each other and jointly delivering the solution. Larger projects are deployed via system integrators who bring-in the expertise of integrating these disparate products in order to deliver tangible business value.

However, most of these vendor collaborations are opportunistic in nature as larger vendors continue to acquire other technology vendors in order to expand their capabilities. M&A activity in the area of edge computing will continue to accelerate
in 2018.