Harman Shows Product Management is Early IoT Differentiator

We are still in the early days in the development and implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, with most enterprises currently evaluating proofs of concepts, rather than undertaking comprehensive deployments.  

As a result, many service providers are selling and delivering IoT projects as stand-alone deployments, with limited sharing of insights across teams.  This isn’t surprising to HfS as IT/BPO service providers have generally lacked the strong product management methodologies and capabilities across the board that prevail in their own clients.  Yet, to be successful in large scale IoT delivery, HfS believes that IoT solutions must be run with a product management approach.  This will be a critical differentiator with IoT services, as the industry avoids the pitfalls created in past offerings, where individual silos of experience and capabilities proliferated, reducing the value created for enterprise clients as a result.

In our HfS Blueprint on IoT Services, we rated Harman in our “Winner’s Circle” as the overall leader in the IoT Service market today, in part because the firm is taking its own experience in product management to develop its own IoT offering.  Unlike traditional IT/BPO service providers, which have been less in the product business than in the provision of labor via service offerings, Harman has a high tech/electronics products background.  IoT deployments can be found across the Harman organization, but as the 2014 acquisition of Symphony Teleca has been integrated, so too is a model for looking at the repeatability of both IoT accelerators and intellectual property across the service provider. 

As a result of deploying product management approaches and investing in shared intellectual property, HfS believes that Harman (www.harman.com) is a great fit for enterprises needing robust end-to-end capabilities delivered with high quality and shared experiences.

HfS scored Harman highly against its peer set of IoT service providers for the following HfS Blueprint evaluation criteria:

• Strength of vision for IoT offering
• Internally developed delivery models for IoT solutions
• The breadth and depth of an IoT partnership ecosystem
• Industry expertise
• Strategy for investments and supporting acquisitions in IoT services