With billions of IoT devices now live across the world, we’re in the era of massive IoT, and this creates significant challenges for IoT organizations. Traditional businesses that are transforming their offerings by adding IoT functionality need to get ready for hyperscale deployments. Similarly, brand new businesses or departments are being launched to provide IoT solutions. For both types of organization, that means creating the capacity to manufacture global IoT-ready products that can connect seamlessly, ideally without local configuration at the point of deployment.

These businesses’ core focus is on the products they make. For a combine harvester manufacturer, for example, its expertise is in optimizing crop yields and selling efficient machines. Adding IoT functionality is a whole new discipline and non-core to its business. Rather than recruiting, equipping and managing a team of IoT specialists – which are hard to recruit and hard to retain – the combine harvester manufacturer can avoid all the friction of in-house development by going to an end-to-end IoT solutions provider. This provider can take all the strain away addressing every aspect from original concept development, through component specification and sourcing, design and prototyping, manufacturing, distribution and logistics, and certification and validation.

The same is true for a start-up which suffers from the same challenges of attracting expert personnel in a competitive market and probably doesn’t need a full-time development function if it plans to create only a few products. The start-up can simply select an IoT solutions provider to handle IoT solution creation from end-to-end – this streamlines sourcing of components, accessing manufacturing capacity and handles distribution and compliance.

Fast, optimized market entry

The end result is an IoT capability that effectively bolts-on to the company’s core products. The start-up receives a ready-for-market product that enables its intellectual property – the experience the new offering provides – to go to market quickly. Importantly, new concepts need to get to market fast, so competitors do not beat them to opportunities. End-to-end IoT solutions providers offer the capacity and experience to help them take their brand-new products to global markets quickly and efficiently.

The combine harvester manufacturer can be confident that the IoT device its end-to-end IoT solutions provider delivers will integrate with its products, will operate anywhere on the planet, will be future-proofed, will have a faster time-to-market and be compliant with various regional and national regulations and certifications. Each of those steps is highly complex and specialized for an individual organization to complete and building up expertise in each of these capabilities is time-consuming and expensive.

In addition, the in-house approach lacks flexibility and places a significant management burden on personnel. A solution that brings together components from multiple vendors with connectivity from a variety of providers leaves the IoT solution exposed if poor performance or failure occur. Each supplier can point to another as the cause of issues and finding the root cause of problems can be convoluted and difficult to determine with accuracy.

Single point of accountability

In contrast, an end-to-end IoT solutions provider is responsible for all aspects of the solution. If modules or antennas fail to integrate, if power consumption is greater than expected, if the device can’t connect to a cellular operator or if it is not approved for operation by a country’s regulator, the customer company knows that all it needs to do is contact the end-to-end IoT solutions provider to address the issues. They have one supplier and that IoT solutions provider is best placed to fix any problems with the solution that it has designed.

Critics of the end-to-end IoT solutions provider approach warn of vendor lock-in and de-skilling of a company’s organization, but the reality is companies are locked-in to component suppliers and connectivity providers anyway. IoT solutions should be seen as simply another aspect of the business – you don’t need to invent another light bulb to add a headlight to a tractor so why would you build your own IoT solution when the pressures of massive scale and intense time-to-market competition are at the heart of modern IoT.

The end-to-end IoT solutions provider is there to deliver an optimized solution that gets you to market quickly, is cost-efficient, flexible, future-proof, truly global and backed by unified support if something goes wrong. A more accurate question would be: Why wouldn’t you choose an end-to-end IoT solutions provider?