Hardware Pioneers Max: not just about the hardware

Last week I was at Hardware Pioneers Max in London. I met a bunch of old friends and chatted IoT as well as dropping into some of the sessions. Here’s some thoughts.

Not just an echo chamber

One thing that becomes immediately apparent from speaking to the various exhibitors is that they’re pleasantly surprised about the number of potential customers are present. There is always some concern with the horizontal IoT shows that it’s mostly ecosystem talking to ecosystem, but seemingly Hardware Pioneers Max has managed to rope in a few of the right kind of attendees.

Hardware and connectivity: inseparable

Firstly, a lot of what was happening resonated with work we’ve been doing at Transforma Insights. Not least the fact that a lot of conversations about IoT connectivity involve talking about the device and connectivity in tandem, as inseparable parts of the development process. That’s a topic that came up in a couple of recent reports, including the Position Paper with Eseye ‘Connected-by-Design: Optimising Device-to- Cloud Connectivity’ and a white paper with Telit Cinterion, ‘The Internet of Things can only be delivered as a managed service’. Both are worth a read.

eSIM, iSIM, eUICC, RSP and other overlapping acronyms

Much of the content of the sessions related to a lot of the topics that we at Transforma Insights have been covering. First session of the day was Kigen, ably assisted by Soracom (which, incidentally, has made a flurry of announcement recently, including this partnership with UnaBiz). The talk there was about eSIM and iSIM, of course, which resonated well with our own report ‘Over 2.3 billion cellular connections will be eUICC/Remote SIM Provisioning (RSP) capable in 2032’, published on the 7th July.

There was a very perceptive point made during that session, that we seem to be hitting a cadence of about one new technology being introduced every year at the moment in this eSIM/iSIM/eUICC/remote SIM provisioning space. It’s all a bit too much for the adopters to cope with. Back in 2016/17 we saw a bit of a slow down in technology development (I referred to it as the first IoT winter) when the rush of new connectivity techs (including NB-IoT, LTE-M, LoRaWAN and Sigfox) and platforms of all types took a little while to bed in. I think we are in for a similar kind of a pause while all of these standards (SGP.02/22/32) mature and the associated operational and technical underpinnings are put in place.

There is also a further set of developments happening in the SIM space around hardware root of trust. Firstly it’s about transport layer security with IoT SAFE. But it’s also increasingly about what’s being termed the ‘economy of things’. This was front and centre the other week, when it was announced that Sumitomo would be investing in Vodafone’s DABCO Digital Asset Broker subsidiary. The underlying idea of devices being able to transact with one another is very interesting, but I will admit that I remain a little sceptical that this kind of decentralised system will ever really be needed.

Artificial Intelligence and Edge

There was a lot of discussion of AI. In fact it rather dominated proceedings, with discussions around ML for sensors, processors for AI, the use of AI in hardware development and several more. For me, the most relevant thing is the impact that AI has on the need for compute resources close to the device. Which brings us to edge compute, which was another key theme of the day.

We’re at the point now where AI and edge as topics are so intrinsically linked that someone is going to try to come up with some kind of horrific portmanteau of the two, such as “A.I.dge” or “EAI”, or something horrible. They’ve tried to do that with IoT and AI, but I’m afraid “AIoT” is never going to be a thing no matter how hard everyone tries. These are separate technologies, they do different things, and they’re closely related. They don’t need to have a single unifying term. Everyone wants to be Kevin Ashton, it seems.

Anyway, back to A.I.dge. There was quite a bit of focus. The implications for the device are quite substantial. In the way that AI made CPUs cool again, so too with IoT hardware. If you’re going to put critical compute on the hardware, it needs to be rather more capable than the dumb terminals that we all came to expect until a few years ago.

Security

It was good to see Wireless Logic talking about something a bit more practical and ‘today’ in amongst all the tomorrow tech. The focus was on IoT security. I don’t need to elaborate much more on this here, as Transforma Insights and Wireless Logic collaborated on a White Paper just a few months ago: Why enterprises need ‘IoT Security-as-a-Service’.

And finally…

As part of the event, the IoT London Meet Up held a few sessions. The one from Dr Boyeun Lee from the University of Exeter Business School was particularly interesting, involving discussion of possible IoT business models. It was nice to hear from someone else trying to identify macro themes across IoT. Loved some of the thinking, for instance in the attached.

This hasn't exactly been a comprehensive review of the event, more some musings on a few things that caught my attention, but worth flagging up anyway, I thought.