IoT Is the Wild, Wild West and Partners Should Stake a Claim

Natasha Royer Coons

By Natasha Royer Coons, Founder, TeraNova Consulting Group

I’m excited to become a columnist for Channel Partners and kick off the first in a series that covers IoT, technology disruption and the channel. As a serial entrepreneur, channel warrior and futurist, I felt the name “Futurepreneur” was apt and I’m hopeful that my experiences and insights help readers of Channel Partners, an information source I’ve valued for many years.    

The internet of things (IoT) solutions market is on track for explosive growth, presenting opportunities for partners to leverage this technology to solve business challenges in innovative and unprecedented ways. The challenge is that currently the technology and supply chain is hypersiloed, not integrated and certainly not channel-enabled or -centric (except for a few unique suppliers).

Nevertheless, this expanding frontier offers five key areas of opportunity:

Some forward-thinking business leaders and Fortune 1000 companies in city planning, manufacturing, transportation, energy, health care and agriculture are already active or planning to get active in IoT. But the vast majority of businesses …

…don’t know how to leverage the technology.

That presents an opportunity for partners to conceive and introduce IoT scenarios that drive better business outcomes for their clients and sooner or later monetize them — and they don’t need to be IoT experts. All they need is access to experts who can help while they continue to educate themselves on the technology and its applications.

Our job as technology consultants is to challenge the thinking of clients so we can help them, and sometimes IoT seeds need time to germinate or become more feasible for financial or other reasons.

I recently had an experience like this with a waste-management company. The idea of a smart waste solution interested the company’s CIO because he would like to be able to track and locate his trash receptacles for new customer deployment and to manage the inventory once deployed. After our initial conversation, I started talking to my network of colleagues about it. I pinged platform, hardware and software companies and developed an integrated solution, but there was a hitch: The sensors on each trash can would be subject to cellular rates, which were much too expensive for this application.

However, as soon as wireless carriers can truly support low power, long range spectrums and equipment, the cost for the connected sensors will be very economical. I told the CIO it’s only a matter of time before I can pull together a “smart waste” solution that will differentiate his company from the competition.

So Saddle Up

IoT is like the Wild West right now and that’s good news for partners who stake a claim. If you don’t have any experience in this expanding frontier, it’s easy to get started. As complex as IoT applications can be, more often than not they aren’t all or nothing scenarios.

Partners can start with a small but meaningful solution and build on its complexity over time. For example, they can deploy a sensor application that provides alerts and predictive analytics, and later expand the solution to add managed services that include automated actions such as increasing the temperature of a room, turning off lights, shutting down equipment, closing a water valve, and so on.

Now is the time to challenge your customers in a positive way by offering unique perspectives that align with their economic and value drivers. If you need assistance with assessing candidates and potential IoT applications, bring in an expert to help and it won’t be long before you’re closing your first deal and generating revenue from it.

Natasha Royer Coons is the founder of TeraNova Consulting Group, a single source for the adoption, deployment and ongoing management of network convergence across the global enterprise. TeraNova consults with channel partners nationwide on delivering mobility and IoT solutions from comprehensive audits to fully managed services and integrates best-of-breed IoT ecosystem players bridging hardware, connectivity, platform as a service, and managed services for a seamless delivery to the end client.