Connecting things drives growth. The benefits of connecting include enhanced functionality, superior reliability, increased product utilisation, and the ability to extend beyond traditional service boundaries. It’s a market opportunity. But it comes with complexity. A new set of risks arise, prompting companies to reconsider and redefine their technology strategies, internal processes, partnerships, and routes to market. They must do so to remain relevant and competitive in today’s marketplace.

Internet of Things…and the impact to business

At Pelion, embedding cellular connectivity into products is our core business. We are excited to see how the combination of connectivity and distributed cloud computing is changing the nature of connected products. It is impacting whole industry structures. Across our markets, we see new opportunities and many new threats to our customers’ businesses. As some companies struggle to maintain the status quo while modernizing, we continue to evaluate and build plans to support them.

Cellular connected products present a new set of strategic choices and opportunities; how best to create value, how best to capitalise and drive revenue (value capture), and how to utilise and manage large amounts of new and sometimes sensitive data. These data-generating products demand a redefinition of relationships with business partners and channels, challenging companies to assume new roles as industry boundaries expand. While the term “Internet of Things” is often used to describe the market for all connected products and the opportunities they offer, it falls short in capturing the essence of the market changes occurring. The key isn’t the internet itself. It is the incredible collective opportunities offered by the actionable insights all the “things,” produce. The power of cellular connectivity is the ubiquitous, real-time data transfer for insights and information.

Value-Chains and Competition

It’s an incredible time to be in business. With the tools at our disposal like Generative AI, Quantum Computing, Additive Manufacturing, Robotics and Connected Products the opportunities are abundant. All these emerging technologies are changing the shape of the industries we operate as we navigate a massive third wave of technology-driven competition.

To navigate the competitive landscape effectively, you need to look beyond the technology itself and focus on the strategic and operational implications of this paradigm shift. Embracing the opportunity requires a thorough understanding of the rules of the game as they exist in your market, today. You must make strategic choices related to value creation, data utilisation, and partnership redefinition.

You will likely need to adapt your product and service design, manufacturing, sales, marketing and after-sale service to accommodate the transformative aspects of cellular connected products with evolving customer expectations. Additionally, you must invest in new activities and tools such as data analytics and security to ensure success in this dynamic and competitive environment. Training the team to expose and optimise the value derived from new systems is key too.

We’ve created a shopping list of considerations we believe every company should have as they venture into cellular connected products:

• Solutions Architecture: to maximise process performance, enhancing chances of stability, maintainability, scalability, and security at all project stages.

• Product: design and systems architecture including short term integration into existing processes. Build vs buy off the shelf.

• Data: Capture, analysis and interpretation to derive meaningful actionable insights. Should Machine Learning and AI be part of the plan?

• Network: which networks and partners offer the right combination of availability and uptime for my solution

• Security: Assuring end-to-end security design for physical products, networks, cloud and internet

• Data Access and visualisation: This is normally a cloud platform for both connected products themselves and for the data they generate.

• Data Management: ensuring that governing laws, regulations and best practices are adhered to for each country in which data is passing or stored.

• Systems Updates and Maintenance: Updating connected products, maintaining them and making sure they remain well connected

Once all the connected systems are architected, new considerations should be brought to how the new solution will affect your company’s

• Leadership team who will have performance and growth indicators at disposal.

• Sales and marketing teams, who can now be empowered with new information to better service customers.

• Customers who will now have better, predictive and pre-emptive service provisions.

• Partners who may participate in or take benefits from the inherent value creation.

On the flipside, a failure to adequately consider all the important aspects of building well connected cellular solutions, may give rise to a complete erosion of business case return on investment. Unreliable cellular products, challenging network conditions, data capture and collections that aren’t well thought through are just some of the areas that could mean delays, post installation returns-to-site and general problems that grind projects to halt and kills the Return on Investment they were initially put in place for.

At Pelion we know how to do it the right way.