Where Are You On Your IoT Journey?

It’s not always crystal clear how your particular IoT Journey will look. The steps you take along the way may follow a clear path, or you may take unexpected turns as your business grows and evolves. One thing is clear, though: with the right support and services you’ll get the most from your IoT journey, no matter where it takes you.

When you started your IoT journey you probably had a business case that would best be realized by connecting things. Everyone’s experience is different and sometimes, when devices are first deployed, controlling that deployment is not at the top of the to-do list;  maybe the deployment wasn’t so big that it needed many changes so contacting the help desk for any changes was all you really needed. It was relatively simple, and you were just happy to have coverage.

Now you had more control and started optimizing your costs, and maybe even started to see the possibilities of new revenue streams, due the data you had. Time passed and new requirements made you reconsider your connectivity provider or your choice of connectivity technology, meaning you now had not one or two but three (or even more) legacy deployments.  Your choices now have you on three parallel IoT journeys, but that’s what customers wanted, right? Complexity was increasing, overview and control was hard, not to mention all those issues with data layers. The need to unify and simplify them became apparent and you began using products that helped you do that.

Once your connectivity was unified you continued to grow, again deploying more devices and getting more data and it’s at this point that you saw that you needed to get deeper into business analytics and get better insights into how your devices were performing – after all, big data is a hygiene factor these days. Online GUI is great, but you want those insights and data delivered straight into your own systems. API and streaming are the way forward, and you now need smarter connectivity.

Because you were determined to get the most from your IoT deployment you made it smarter and in turn, your business continued to grow. You might have started with 500 devices but now have 50 000 or even 100 000+ and are deploying in places you wouldn’t have dreamed of a few years ago – but which come with their own regulatory challenges. At this point you have a completely different set of requirements from both a global connectivity perspective and a quality perspective. You require low latency and probably attractive pricing beyond the retail offer.

Fragmented technologies, unpredictable connectivity costs, and regulatory difficulties might be just a few of the challenges you’re facing.  And the off-the-shelf connectivity everyone is offering is no longer enough for deployments of this nature. You need something bespoke that is tailored to your needs, but you don’t want to be heavily investing in building up an IoT/Telco company inhouse to deliver all of this – you want it delivered as-a-Service.

You’re always going to need your global SIMs with roaming agreements, you’re still going to need analytics, and you will always need to unify because who knows what technology lies around the corner? Your choices now should future proof your IoT solution, no matter what comes tomorrow .

The good news is that if you’ve made considered choices along the way you have already implemented technologies, products, and services that build upon one another, so as you reach unicorn status it’s really just a matter of adding that final layer that will make everything you’ve built work in harmony, like a well-oiled machine.

Building from the bottom up and adding layers where and when needed will take a lot of pain out of your IoT journey. With Tele2 IoT it doesn’t matter where you are in your journey – our solutions are built like legos stacked on top of one another: they fit with whatever you are building, whether that’s getting your deployment off the ground, unifying an already-complex solution, or giving you the tools you need to manage your global deployment in one consolidated access technology-agnostic platform.