I was recently involved as a judge for the annual IoT Global Awards, the results of which were announced on the 8th February. Of course I’m not at liberty to share how I voted or which of the candidates were my favoured ones, but I think it’s interesting to look a little at the winners and what they tell us about the state of the Internet of Things.
Security was, of course, a prominent topic in the awards. According to Transforma Insights’ recent Enterprise IoT Connectivity Survey it was the number two factor influencing vendor choice for IoT buyers. The winner in the ‘securing IoT’ category was Atsign, for its capability of enabling IoT with zero open ports and zero static IP address. Following on from that theme, but for a vertical solution, in the ‘automotive, transport & travel’ category, Overhaul came out on top for its supply chain visibility and security solution.
In other vertical categories, Connected Innovations picked up the ‘connected consumer & smart home’ award for an electrical appliance safety solution. Monnit won in the ‘connected health or wearable tech’ category for its remote monitoring solution focused on new-born children in sub-Saharan Africa. In ‘industry & construction’ it was Fischer Group, a company better known as a seller of building materials, for its construction monitoring solution. And in ‘smart cities, government and utilities’, Connectpoint won for its neat Falcon Text-to-Speech Device for deployment in public transport.
Avarisoft picked up the award in the ‘big data, cloud & analytics’ category for a very interesting solution that fuses IoT data with other data sources in order to provide insights to the tourism industry. It’s a small Australian start-up, but doing interesting things.
The ’research & development or new launch’ winner was Pod Group, specifically for its smart shipping label product. In the Transforma Insights IoT Forecast Database we predict that the market for disposable devices such as that will grow almost 200-fold over the next 10 years. It’s a good space to be in.
Pod was one of three (or possibly four, depending how you count it) MVNOs that picked up gongs this year. iBASIS was the winner of ‘start-Up, business development or ecosystem of the year’ for its Global Access for Things, its global eSIM-based connectivity offering. In a related theme, Uber launched its own SIM, in conjunction with ConnectedYou, under the branding UberSIM. It uses eSIM to support connectivity in over 70 countries. Not a patch on most MVNOs, but optimised for use with Uber. A very interesting development.
This success for MVNOs reflects what I was discussing in a recent blog post on ‘A new taxonomy for the Internet of Things', whereby so much of IoT has shifted out of infrastructure domains and into a set of 7 service domains. In connectivity this equates quite closely to the MVNOs, who can take advantage of the separation of so much of IoT moving into the software space.
And finally, hearty congratulations to Nick Earle, Chairman and CEO of Eseye who was voted ‘CxO of the year’. If Eseye and its competitors are of interest to you, then you’ll want to check out our Communications Service Provider IoT Peer Benchmarking Report when its published in late February. In the meantime we also recommend checking out the associated webinar ‘Who's winning the race to become a Hyperscale IoT Connectivity Provider? IoT best practice for CSPs’ on the 9th February (and available on demand).
