Gartner's VP &  Fellow - Technology Visionary & Futurist David Cearley joined the conversation on one of my earlier posts about the Internet of Things: Digital Mesh Or Digital Goo? What will bind the IoT Ecosystem together? 
Call it the Internet of Things (IoT) or The Internet of Everything (IoE), players in this burgeoning field are facing a common set of challenges as I fathomed from a conversation with a leading vendor venturing into this space:
  • "Where are the Guinea Pigs?"  (Early Adopters): The biggest one is getting people willing to pay/invest in this area since most are not able to visualize the benefits of the analytics which can be generated or the operational efficiencies which can be realized using IoT/IoE. Vendors have an uphill climb trying to explain how they can help improve operational efficiency till they can find a stakeholder forward looking enough to make the small investments and allow the vendor access to at least a  subset of the environment to do a pilot and prove the use case. The vendors with proven success stories have a head-start.
  • "No Cookie-Cutters": Every environment is unique. A cookie-cutter, one size fits all approach cannot work. While a vendor can suggest their platform as a offering they still need to work with other partners to deliver an integrated solution. The vendors are finding themselves challenged to deliver services to the customers tailored to their unique and completely different environments. A big opportunity for strategic/implementation partners.
  • "Missing Sensors": The biggest technical challenge is not security as one would expect but the fact that lots of devices do not have the capabilities to capture the data/metrics to generate the required analytics. The vendors need to leverage sensor technology to add sensors to legacy devices to pull back requisite data esp. in the Manufacturing and Buildings industry sectors.
Are you working in the IoT/IoE space? What are some of the challenges you are facing? Please join the conversation.
Originally published on LinkedIn. You can join the conversation there.