The winners of the IoT Global Awards were recently announced, highlighting some of the brightest and best of Internet of Things providers, across vertical solutions areas and horizontal technologies. In this blog post Matt Hatton, one of the judges, explores how, as ever, the award winners illustrated some of the more interesting changes occurring in IoT.
In the automotive, transport & travel category, Overhaul won for its Intelligent Door Seal Solution, demonstrating the increasing importance of smart supply chain solutions to ensure secure and reliable delivery throughout the supply chain. A recent Transforma Insights report identified seven key ‘Domains of Change’ in Transportation and Storage, which were heavily focused on associated topics, including condition monitoring and supply chain transparency. Blues’ win in the industry & construction category further reflected a similar trend, being focused on industrial supply chain monitoring.
The growing requirement for IoT to support elder care was also highlighted by Pontosense, which triumphed in the connected health or wearable tech category with its Silver Shield product. As highlighted in our 2023 report Digital Transformation in the Healthcare Sector, the need to support an aging population is a critical driver for adoption of a diverse range of technologies across IoT, AI and others.
Turning to IoT connectivity, Transatel/NTT picked up the award for research & development or new launch for its Utmost connected SIM product. Transatel has certainly been making waves in the IoT connectivity space in the last year. It features as one of the top tier of IoT MVNOs in our recent IoT MVNO market landscape report. Another company that features in that top tier is Wireless Logic, which has continued to be busy with more acquisitions in 2023, as well as developing interesting capabilities such as the security offering for which it won the securing IoT category. Transforma Insights worked with Wireless Logic last year on a White Paper ‘Why enterprises need IoT Security-as-a-Service’.
Every year, Transforma Insights identifies a set of IoT Transition Topics that will be significant ones during the year. This included the use of Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) for IoT. EchoStar Mobile picked up the award for start up, business development or ecosystem of the year for its satellite connectivity product.
Meanwhile, Kyvos Insights’ victory in the big data, cloud & analytics category demonstrated the increasing importance of AI within IoT. Back in 2022 we at Transforma Insights identified that IoT would account for 99% of AI instances, illustrating one way in which the two technology families are self-reinforcing. Similarly, in a report last year we identified an increasing need for connectivity to support AI at various points in the network, as part of the need to be ‘Connected by Design’. In the case of Kyvos, the focus is on using cloud-based analytics drawing on Generative AI to support IoT data crunching.
The IoT executive of the year award was won by Stefan Albertsson of AddSecure, demonstrating the fact that much of the running in IoT is being made by solution providers, focused on solving customer pain points, rather than simply providing a technology. That’s a topic that we at Transforma Insights have covered a lot, emphasizing how the role of IoT vendors is to hold the hand of the customer as they deploy rather than just throwing technology over the fence and hoping it sticks.
Congratulations to all the winners!
