Many companies lack the software expertise to develop applications that fully leverage the potential of IoT, says Software AG’s chief product officer, Dr Stefan Sigg.
He told IoTAustralia that many companies’ software expertise today was limited to configuring and managing package applications, and they lacked the ability to undertake the full development from scratch needed to gain maximum value from IoT.
“Many companies have IT organisations that have been dealing with, let’s say outsourcing over the last decade.” Sigg said.
“In the beginning, when IT came into the companies, they started to build products and solutions on their own, for example, using our old products, Adabas and Natural. Then standardisation came through SAP and others and IT organisations became more and more system configurators and not software engineers.
“But now the challenge of IoT applications brings them back to software engineering in the core product development and product production areas. I think it will take time until companies have built up the skills to build software applications. … IoT application maturity will come when there is a critical mass again of software engineering in companies.”
Software AG has just released the results of a survey of 125 North American manufacturers that, it says, shows many unable to scale their industrial IoT investments, losing millions of dollars in potential profits, and falling behind competitors that have invested in the enabling technologies able to support IIoT across the enterprise.
Creativity in short supply
Sigg also identified a lack of creativity to enable the creating of game-change software for IoT applications.
“Imagination is sometimes a limiting factor and that has to do with some experience level of product engineers, mechanical engineers thinking in terms of software,” he said.
“Striving for higher value applications, which add potential, commercialisable value to a product is difficult. Everybody’s writing about it, but we are very far from that in the broad industry. Everybody knows that these kind of new business models rely heavily on the data and the software that goes with a product.”
Key role for IoT platforms
Sigg sees IoT platforms like Software AG’s Cumulocity playing a key role in facilitating the development of sophisticated, bespoke IoT applications, saying they were an essential component, but not a complete solution.
“The platform can be outsourced, but not the last mile of application development because that involves so much domain expertise. And you don’t want to outsource something which is absolutely mission critical and differentiated for your product. … If you want to insource it you have to have the software development expertise, and that is the bottleneck right now,” he said.
“The platform needs to minimise the effort to build an application on top of it. It should learn more and more of common things that it can do and not an application developer for IoT. Artificial intelligence will play a huge role.
Partnership with Telstra
Sigg said that one way to accelerate the development of specific applications was to evolve an application developed for a specific use case into other similar applications, and the company was looking to do this through its relationship with Telstra.
Telstra and Software AG are using Cumulocity to develop a water management system for Busselton Water in Western Australia that they intend to offer to the wider industry.
“Telstra is a multiplier for us. We are embracing many customers of theirs,” Sigg said.
He added that the company was looking to expand the partnership beyond applications for the water industry.
“We are open to any kind of a mechanism to get a bunch of customers together. We do that here in Germany with the machinery building companies. And in Australia, we are open to any ideas into that direction.”
Stuart Rees, vice president for Australia and New Zealand, told IoTAustralia that Software AG had found new partners in mining, agriculture and some universities.
“Building partnerships and moving up into the commercial research that universities do allows us to help them help customers at very early stages of projects and IoT opportunities. We’re talking with multiple universities and we have a program globally specifically for supporting universities with IoT software.”
