The OEM’s Path to Competitive Strength in Industrial IoT

A very useful tool to assess competitive market strength and differentiation examines a company’s “Ability to Execute” Vs. their “Completeness of Vision” for a set of capabilities relative to their competitors. At IoT83, we have seen this tool to be very useful for our customers and partners as they form their strategic execution plan to establish leadership in Industrial IoT (IIoT), AI integration, and digital transformation overall.

?As an example of how a given OEM or Operator might leverage this tool, we have placed an example OEM in the bottom left, or “Niche Player” quadrant. We also assume that this OEM wants to expand upward into the “Challenger” quadrant by increasing its “Ability to Execute”, and to the right into the “Visionary” quadrant by expanding its “Completeness of Vision”. The logical ultimate goal would be to expand on both of these vectors to move into the top right “Leader” quadrant. (Note: the placement of other IIoT players in this matrix is conceptual and solely based on IoT83’s understanding of these company’s competitive positioning alone.)

However, it has been very challenging for industrial OEMs to make this strategic transition into the “Challenger” or “Completeness” quadrants due to the inherent complexity of IIoT, AI, and digital transformation technology. Until recently, to make moves on either vector has required extensive specialty skills to build, deploy, and manage “big data” infrastructure and the complex analytics as well as the big budgets that entails. Such moves also implied very long development cycles, with these long cycle times adding still more risk to such programs. The net of this was a very high total cost of ownership, a long time to market, a long gaps between investments and a positive ROI.

?But the IIoT and digital transformation ecosystem has evolved dramatically over the last several years. At IoT83, our company has maintained a relentless focus on building a path for this migration that is not only cost and time efficient, but that also reduces both the inherent complexity of the IIoT, AI, and digital transformation technology, but also the amount and depth of specialty skills that are needed to successfully make this transition. And at the same time, we understand that the degree of professionalism and enterprise-grade completeness cannot be compromised, so we have built into our solution the essential scalability, reliability, cyber-security, and flexibility this high bar of quality requires. We have combined all of this into our Flex Catalyst Platform. (Please see my other articles or our website for details on the Flex Catalyst Platform.)

?So, powered by a solution with all of the capabilities of the Flex Platform, this transition that was almost prohibitively difficult before, is now a much more straightforward program focused on “execution” vs “invention”. Now OEMs migration up into the “Ability” quadrant, and over into the “Completeness” quadrant is more a focus on mapping their strategic competitive focus into the Flex Platform vs accumulating all of the specialty skills, paying for the long development cycle to build the platform, and only then building their strategic applications.

Because the “out of the box” completeness of the Flex Platform, starting with fast PoC and MVP cycles, an OEM immediately jumps forward on both vectors. First, the completeness of the underlying platform itself, including scalability, reliability, cyber-security, and ease-of deployment completely transforms the OEM’s “Ability to execute”. Further adding to the “Ability” vector is the OEM’s access to all of the Flex Platform core services, documentation, SDKs and APIs, as well as full access to expert assistance from IoT83 engineering. All of this adds greatly to the OEM’s flexibility in execution. But the OEM also jumps forward significantly on the “Completeness of Vision” dimension by leveraging the extensive IIoT, AI, and digital transformation capabilities provided with the Flex Platform “Catalyst Applications”. The Flex “Catalyst” code includes all of the most widely used IIoT, AI, and Digital Transformation services such as Remote Monitoring & Management, Data Ingestion, Data Transformation, Rules Management, Identity Access Management, Analytics, Actions on Events, Predictive Maintenance, AI & ML toolsets, and a lot more. These features can be used more or less “as is” in PoCs, MVPs, or even scaled applications, but more typically the “Catalyst” serves as the foundation for strategic refactoring and customization to best suit the needs of the OEM’s strategic differentiation. Here, small changes in the “Catalyst” result in major transformations and competitive advantages in the final solution.

?We can imagine the following (very typical) progression:

? In an initial validation step, the OEM will work with IoT83 on a PoC or MVP, where a key set of OEM assets are integrated and many of the Flex Catalyst3 Platform features are demonstrated to validate all of the claims IoT83 has made regarding the platform value.

? Following a “buy” decision, the OEM will work with IoT83 on a “Foundation PRD”. Here, even if the OEM intends to use only its own engineering resources to execute the PRD, leveraging the IoT83 expertise in defining the foundation is a big help. IoT83 typically advises that the foundation, or first product, be based on improvement of key strategic KPIs, but also relatively modest in scope to enable a powerful “quick win” and fast ROI.

? From there, the OEM can define incremental PRDs, building on this foundation, continually moving across the “Completeness” vector, and up the “Capabilities” axis.

This walk-through should show how using a best-in-class solution like the Flex Platform is a real game-changer for OEMs and Operators that want to significantly change their IIoT and digital transformation market position. We have learned through years of customer engagements that successful enterprise-grade solutions cannot simply be built using limited low-code platforms, but we also recognized the need for OEMS to be able to build, deploy, and manage solutions without hiring a new army of specialty-skills engineers and that time-to-market, time-to-revenue, and total cost of ownership are all essential. IoT83’s Flex Platform was built from the start to change exactly these dynamics for OEMs and Operators.?Please review my other articles or our website to get a more detailed view of the details of how and why this really works.

?Finally, our team is laser focused on our customer’s successes – not only with our products – but also in leader to leader, and engineer to engineer engagement and support. Please do give us a call for a deeper look, because as we love to say at IoT83: “Seeing is believing!”.