Photo Roger Joanes, used under Creative Commons license
Harbor Research has launched a blistering condemnation of today’s IoT platforms, branding them “a kludgy collection of yesterday’s technology and architectures that do not address the most basic development challenges.”
It has dismissed the “fantastic IoT marketing stories [from platform vendors] about what their solutions can do,” as misrepresentations of a “fragmented collection of incomplete platforms, narrow point-solutions, and software incompatibility.”
These views are expounded in a white paper, labelled simply Failure of IoT Platforms. In it Harbor Research says the telecom, IT and automation and control sectors have failed to re-evaluate their relationship to advancing technology.
“The business and technology paradigms to which these communities cling today are far too limiting, too cumbersome and too expensive to foster and sustain digital innovation and new growth.”
Harbor Research argues that the parlous state of IoT platforms is the result of most large developers and suppliers of technology attempting to address the emerging IoT opportunity being unable to spot “emergent discontinuities”.
Tyranny of replication
“Many players’ assumptions about future architecture for smart systems are being shaped by the past and are being extrapolated into the future in a linear fashion. Most of the large established IT equipment, software and network players appear to be stuck in this tyranny of replication.”
Harbor Research argues that today’s platforms for smart systems and the IoT should be “taking on the toughest challenges of interoperability, information architecture and user complexity,” but are failing to do so.
“We need to creatively evolve to an entirely new approach that avoids the confinements and limitations of the today’s differing platforms,” it says.
“We need to quickly move to a ‘post platform’ world where there is a truly open data and information architecture that can easily integrate diverse machines, data, information systems and people – a world where smarter systems will smoothly interact to create systemic intelligence – a world where there are no artificial barriers between different types of information.”
A $US300B market opportunity
For vendors that can get this right, Harbor Research forecasts rich pickings. “The smart systems, services and IoT platform market potential represents as much as $[US]75 billion today growing to as much as a $[US]300 billion potential market by 2023,” it says.
It lists “four critical needs” for platforms that will enable new connected machine and device applications:
- A fully configurable software platform architecture that enables both peer-to-peer and client-server distribution of services;
- A platform that can simultaneously and asynchronously act on any type of information from any device, storage or streaming source;
- A platform that can enable real-time temporal, spatial and state-based contextual processing; and,
- A platform that provides tools for development of real-time, stateful applications.
Harbor Research says established players will need to develop new relationships if they are to be successful, “deliberately seeking out ‘strange bedfellows’ and radical innovators,” and that many larger IT, infrastructure and software players will turn to acquisitions as a path to off-set development complexity and time to market.
