Building an IoT Solution? Only 12% Succeed
A few years ago, Cisco surveyed tech executives and learned things weren’t going so hot with their IoT initiatives. 75% of them failed. Yeah. That’s not a typo. A more recent report by Beecham Research produced similar results. 18% of the 25,000 IoT adopters surveyed said their projects were completely unsuccessful and another 40% said they were just mostly unsuccessful.
Only 12% said they were completely successful.
You would think then that IoT is doomed.
Far from it. The market size for the Internet of Things is expected to grow to over 1 trillion dollars by 2030 and is already worth nearly 700 billion dollars today.
That’s a whole lot of dollars for a measly 12% success rate — and that’s because the value of success with IoT is so high. Researchers Frost and Sullivan use what they call their “IoT Actualization Quotient” to measure what “stage” of IoT implementation a given company is at. They found that on average IoT adopters had over 12% higher profit margins than their competitors. Even companies at the earliest stage of adoption, “Connected Enterprise,” saw significant improvements across multiple metrics like revenue, employee productivity, and operational efficiency.
“[Connected Enterprises] are just beginning their journey and focused on getting systems connected to gain organization visibility. This is often an initial use case and the stepping stone to getting internal purse strings loosened for actual, tangible IoT investment. This involves investing in platforms and devices to provide always-on connectivity to mission-critical applications, both between employees and applications, and between widespread applications themselves.”
– Frost & Sullivan
What causes IoT initiatives to fail?
Making sure your IoT plans wind up as “completely successful” isn’t necessarily easy, but it doesn’t have to be that hard either if you have the right expertise (granted, that’s a big if).
Across multiple studies, “expertise” is continually cited as a decisive factor for determining an IoT project’s success or failure. That may seem obvious, but “expertise” is a particularly tricky concept when it comes to IoT. Cisco reported that 60% of the engineering and business leaders they surveyed said that their IoT initiatives looked good on paper, but proved to be a lot more complex when it came to actual implementation.
That’s because what we think of as “IoT” isn’t one thing. It’s an ecosystem of interconnected hardware and software. It involves the physical devices themselves, the message protocols that govern communication on the network, data security, cloud connectivity and storage, and the web and mobile apps that allow users to interact with the system in real time. It’s an amalgamation of practically every kind of engineering you can think of. Plus, you need data scientists or subject matter experts available who can effectively analyze and leverage the data your system produces.
Most companies, especially ones at the beginning of their IoT transition or are early-stage, don’t have all of the expertise they need internally to connect devices. They have to seek out and build partnerships with external experts. Cisco found that companies whose IoT initiatives were successful engaged their partners at every stage of development.
Why do companies choose Onymos as their IoT partner?
Onymos was founded on a simple premise: software development was too inefficient.
Development times were too long and slowed down even more by the time it took to maintain existing software. Complex integrations between software and third-party providers were time-consuming to implement and unreliable (like when Google announced the deprecation of its Cloud IoT Core), and there was a lack of experts to do all of that stuff in the first place (plus, those experts cost a lot).
That’s why we pioneered the concept of Features-as-a-Service, a platform of highly extensible pre-built software engineered to solve for all of those inefficiencies. We’ve helped companies at every stage, from Fortune 100 enterprises to startups, get to market faster and refocus their existing engineers and tech experts on building business value, not the software commodities.
We leverage our customers’ expertise, our system integrators, and our serverless, pro-code platform to build cutting-edge, highly secure IoT ecosystems in as little as 8 weeks. And only Onymos gives you complete access to its entire source code. We believe in the opposite of vendor lock-in — we make hardware companies into software companies.
Make sure your next IoT initiative is part of the 12%. Get started with a free consultation, go in-depth into how Onymos IoT works, and hear more of our customer success stories.