Actility held an Operator Forum in Paris last week. For them, being positioned as an IoT connectivity platform provider for LoRaWAN networks, it is smart to bring Operators and other applicable successful use-case-providers together in one room.
The event was all about sharing knowledge & experiences, discussing strategies and learning from the other regions and continents. Here is a link to their post about it.
We (WMW-hub.com) were fortunate to attend this and were asked - as an application layer - to share our experiences and formulate some best practices into this market looking at it from our perspective. To position us: WMW is a one-of-a-kind technology to build, architect and orchestrate applications that collect any kind of data from any kind of source and construct any kind of insight in the form of apps, conclusions, reports, notifications, API calls, ... Our clients are Operators, System Integrators and Device Makers.
Our CEO, Bert Vanaken, was asked to join one discussion explaining the challenges we face while integrating and on-boarding Operators' systems and Device makers' products. He also joined a second discussion explaining how Operators could think more about solutions rather than connectivity-only and how to do this without competing with their current and future connectivity-only customers.
Since business models are not fully set in stone yet and most are still looking/learning on how to build the right model to monetise this new emerging technology we can honestly say that companies like us very much feel the impact of this quest. We have a substantial portion of work to keep up with everybody's API's and even more with each and every pricing model. Since we construct part of the End2End product of a Device Maker, but also play a big part in a solution for a System Integrator we find that it is hard for both of the above to export their solutions into other regions. For us it is not so big of a challenge since we envisioned this while we were making our core framework but if more standardisation and agreements would be in place, our global System Integrators would have a much easier job in selling a solution multiple times. This would mean a huge win for all Operators.
Operators that look into E2E solutions should do this with care. They should not refrain from it but construct a model where they will not compete with E2E players and or solution providers in their region. Our friends at NNNco share a similar vision and we are glad that we were able to help in fine tuning the model and building the full stack around it.
All in all we were happy to see the recognition of our approach but even more with the growing numbers that the market is showing. In 2018 talk of the town was "Was Gartner correct in their prediction?". We now see from recent studies that the adoption is well on its way and the numbers are met. You can read some more on NNNco's post about it.
Thanks a lot for this very meaningful event, it was great. Hope to see you all next year.