Consumer IoT Margin Protection from B2B2C Ecosystem Development
IoT sits firmly ensconced in the hype phase, with vendors making distinctions between industrial and consumer IoT. The consumer space often times gets confused with consumerized devices that, as we know, have been suffering from compressed margins and shrinking average selling prices (ASPs) for years.
But consider what the consumer device brings to the palm of your hand: It brings the power of 1,000 servers from twenty years ago for the cost of approximately $5 million in 1997 in a smartphone form factor costing about $500 today. That is a platform that powered a smaller large enterprise and all of their application layers. As such, the power of the home device platform is more than adequate to address a variety of applications for home or consumer use given the affordability resulting the 20-year march of Moore's Law.
In addressing the Consumer IoT space, we at Technology Business Research believe that technology vendors have to begin thinking of the Consumer IoT space as really representing two distinct components: the traditional consumer components revolving around lifestyle convenience and the emerging "consumerized" components of providing high value (and therefore higher margin) safety services for personal asset and life protection running on the handheld data centers of today.
A more detailed analysis can be downloaded from the TBR website here.