IoT development challenges

How SMBs are implementing IoT technology

Key findings from Report 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic was a powerful disruptive factor that forced many industries to restructure their supply chain, value delivery methods, and operational workflows. IoT proved to be the lever allowing to optimize the value delivery chain in the new normal. Oriented Soft conducted a survey between several dozen SMB C-level executives to find out how they approached and tackled the crisis using their IoT initiatives.

Here is what we found:
  • Increasing business efficiency was the main goal of implementing the IoT initiatives for 58% of respondents
  • Finding the best way to monetize their IoT tools was the biggest challenge for 47% of the executives
  • Idea validation proved to be the most complex software development stage for 30% of the executives surveyed
  • 50% of respondents stated they reached their business objectives within the first year of launching their IoT projects.
IoT development challenges report | Oriented Soft | orientedsoft.com
Reading the report will allow you to learn the latest facts and figures of the IoT market, the challenges the businesses want to address by IoT implementation, the benefits they gain by doing this, the optimal way to ROI, and the stages of the IoT solution development and implementation.

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Below we provide a brief overview of the report contents for your convenience.

1
The state of the IoT market and the forecast for 2021-2025
The number of connected devices globally is estimated to reach nearly 31 billion by 2025. Mc, Kinsey predicts the data from them to deliver about $11 trillion in economic value by 2025. Nearly 70% of this value will come in the form of operational efficiency savings in B2B interactions of various kinds. More than 80% of enterprise C-level decision-makers state the IoT to be the main shaping factor in their industries.

As you can see, it’s high time to jump on the hype train and ride the wave or risk losing the competitive race to more tech-savvy market players. But what are the benefits of IoT implementation the businesses expect to leverage?

2
Factors behind the IoT projects for various businesses
How benefit from IoT | orientedsoft.com
The reasons behind the decision to launch an IoT initiative were very different for various businesses. Some lacked budgets to keep doing things in the old way and had to invest in automation of some of their processes. Others wanted to speed up long sales cycles. Yet others had to innovate on an oversaturated market. Some respondents stated they wanted to connect the whole toolkit in use to form a centralized and transparent system and enable better asset monitoring.

This section gives a detailed explanation of all the aspects of these decisions. However, once the projects started, the respondents had to overcome various challenges. 

3
Challenges to overcome during the IoT implementation
Finding a way to implement an IoT solution in your organization is easier than finding the monetization model that will provide profit. Gaining the stakeholder’s buy-in might also be quite hard. Overcoming legacy infrastructure limitations and budget constraints is surely a debacle. Ensuring the security of data processed by the IoT solution is paramount. It’s hard to find a demonstrable way for quick ROI in every case.

As you can see, there are lots of organizational and technical barriers to overcome during the IoT implementation. However, this section showcases many positive results.
For example, more than 20% of the respondents were able to reach their project goals in under a year and get ROI on their IoT initiatives, while the rest were doing it a bit slower.

4
IoT product development stages
IoT software development stages | How SMBs are implementing IoT technology Report
This section of the report outlines the steps the respondents made to release their IoT solutions, as well as the challenges they faced along the way. For instance, idea evaluation proved to be the most complex stage for many of them, due to the lack of experience with IoT implementation across their industries in general. Selecting the most appropriate IoT technology stack and integrating it with the existing toolkit and infrastructure also proved to be challenging for nearly a third of the respondents.

However, as more than a half were able to achieve steady ROI quickly, there definitely are some winning strategies to follow when designing an IoT project roadmap.

Do you want to increase business efficiency from IoT initiatives by 30%?

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5
Winning IoT implementation strategies to use
IoT strategies and IoT IoT project roadmap | Oriented Soft
This section covers the key differences between horizontal and vertical IoT implementation approaches, 5 points to consider while designing your IoT project roadmap, and showcases the factors that influence the architecture and functionality of the resulting solution.

The report continues by exploring the possible ways to ROI when implementing the IoT projects, showcases 3 possible use case scenarios for such solutions, and lists 4 possible monetization models for them.

6
IoT project roadmap and development
This section lists the key components of any IoT solution (sensors, connectivity, platform, dashboards and analytics) along with the key items you need to plan ahead before starting the development process, such as prioritizing your investments correctly, revolutionizing the cor processes instead of bolting the IoT sideways, coming up with proper IoT ecosystem management workflows, etc.

Once the development is ongoing, it’s important to track whether it follows the roadmap and measure the progress towards the milestones to ensure you do not lose momentum and direction. This includes outlining the concept in detail, performing and in-depth market research and target audience analysis, selecting the hardware required to run the solution, obtaining access to in-house or external IoT development expertise, ensuring the security of the data processed, testing the solution before the release and performing ongoing adjustments when needed.
IoT development roadmap | Oriented Soft
The key IoT solution functionality should be outlined in a blueprint, including:
  • support for various data transfer protocols;
  • enable data aggregation, normalization and orchestration;
  • be secure by design and automatically detect edge computing nodes;
  • be scalable to support enterprise-grade deployments at scale.

7
Finding the talent required
Lastly, the report covers the approaches to gaining the expertise needed to develop, launch and manage an IoT solution for your business. It lists the skills necessary for IoT developers and covers the rules that can help you to find a reliable software services vendor.

We are sure this report will be of use to any decision-maker planning to launch an IoT project. It provides a thorough overview of every stage and steps on the way from an idea to a release of the ready platform.  

Download the report today, and disrupt your market segment with the Internet of Things!

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