The Growing Value of IoT Marketplaces

The Internet of Things (IoT) is continuing to grow, but as the number of connections increases, so do the number of market players offering an ever-increasing offering of connected components and solutions. Enterprises and developers looking to create IoT solutions must navigate this scattered marketplace to piece together hardware, connectivity, and value-added services components into fully integrated end-to-end solutions. Recognizing that this is resource and time intensive, suppliers began to create cohesive ecosystem offerings by leveraging partnerships to simplify the IoT project implementation process. One innovation that emerged from these evolving ecosystems is the IoT Marketplace, which facilitates interactions between buyers looking to develop IoT solutions and IoT suppliers. While these marketplaces do not solve all the problems associated with developing IoT solutions, they are effectively simplifying the IoT solution adoption process for enterprise developers.   

What differentiates IoT solutions from traditional technology solutions is that in order to create an end-to-end IoT solution, several value chain fragments need to be integrated seamlessly together. Without these ecosystems and marketplaces, enterprises are forced to navigate multiple suppliers and offerings to piece together multiple components along the IoT value chain from hardware devices and connectivity management services, to device software platforms and application development tools. In a 2015 survey, ABI Research found that 30% of end users believed that one of the key inhibitors of IoT solutions was that there was a lack of suppliers with knowledge of vendors and partners serving the full IoT value chain. IoT Marketplaces address this concern by making it faster and easier for customers to create and deploy connected solutions by delivering every component of the IoT value chain. The key component offerings that IoT Marketplaces must include are certified device portfolios, device cloud solutions, application development tools, data service integration tools, solution management tools, and an ecosystem of development partners.    

However, not every IoT Marketplace currently offers all of these components or provides limited offerings and solutions. This is to be expected in a nascent market like IoT, which is continuing to grow and mature. Suppliers are currently working on expanding their existing marketplace offerings to include more of these components. What is striking, though, is that these suppliers may have all the pieces in place for a comprehensive IoT Marketplace but simply lack the integration between existing programs and resources. For example, Amazon Web Services has several marketplace components that are not yet fully integrated, as its marketplace is currently solely focused on software. The AWS IoT Hardware Program is available outside of the marketplace, but currently these components are not integrated into the AWS Marketplace. The pieces of the solution are there, but they are not yet easily accessible.

Other suppliers such as PTC and Dell effectively leveraged their core offerings along with strategic partnerships to deliver fully integrated end-to-end IoT solutions in their respective IoT Marketplaces. PTC’s offerings are centered around its ThingWorx Platform offering, while Dell’s offering is centered around its line of IoT edge gateways. IoT Marketplaces help to align disparate companies and IoT component offerings into ecosystems that offer end-to-end IoT solutions. These marketplaces will blur the lines of competitor and partner, but in order for IoT to meet its full potential and deliver interoperable solutions, collaboration between companies is essential. By offering pre-integrated components, application development time and cost is reduced while increasing overall solution security. As these marketplaces grow and mature, they will continue to take the friction out of the IoT development process for both enterprises and developers.