For IoT initiatives, enterprises need relationships, end-to-end portfolios, industry context

• Strong client relationships are critical for service providers to expand their IoT portfolio. As clients start to observe value from their initial IoT pilots and proof-of-concepts, they are investing more to scale those projects as well as starting new initiatives. And the existing vendors are the biggest beneficiary of this.
• As IoT initiatives include different value chain segments and demand different technology skillsets, clients prefer providers with an end-to-end service portfolio that spans across consulting, use-case specific solution/accelerator, hardware, and IoT platform among others. From IoT deployment perspective, clients expect service providers to have knowledge about connectivity protocols and standards, cloud engineering, cyber security, and data intelligence, which is essential for end-to-end IoT architecture.
• Industry knowledge is important for specific capability (often use-case specific) development. For example, quality management solution (besides statistical quality control) for heavy industries/semiconductor often involve visual analytics for defect identification whereas in pharmaceutical, the solution captures data regarding formulation and process parameters which are also required for compliance purposes.

The Bottom Line: As IoT applications are becoming strategic initiatives for the enterprises, they are relying on the service providers for technology support across IoT segments. Besides obvious technical capability, they are also evaluating the industry expertise of the providers. Thus, knowledge about specific industry processes and use-case specific solutions of the providers are becoming key differentiators for IoT vendor selection