How not to fail on IoT

IoT is a real phenomenon which continues to transform enterprises, cities, farms, industries and many more. Typical IoT environment is a complex set-up as various components need to come together to make sure technology works, so you can collect the data you need. I have been a sales person in IoT industry for more than 5 years. I have been working globally with many different countries, companies, cultures and backgrounds. I have seen companies transforming themselves, by the help of IoT and also many failed projects. Today I will try to sum-up which are the main drivers behind a successful IoT venture.

In essence, there are 2 types of IoT projects; Strategic or Tactical IoT. Strategic IoT projects are typically driven by the top management, linked to other parts of the organization and have a bit more clear business case behind. Where else Tactical IoT projects are usually driven by business units, executed mostly by internal resources and not linked to the overall business goals.

Both Strategic and Tactical IoT projects may or may not succeed depending on the ambition levels. However, I challenge my customers to think about their core business and how IoT can enable improvements on it. At the end of the day IoT is not what you are good at. Why not outsource the tech and focus on business value and data monetization. At the end of the day, you will collect a lot of sensor data and you need to have a plan how to monetize it. If IoT does not improve your core business, it will eventually fail because the underlying tech-ecosystem is rather complex and IoT requires continues vendor/technology/strategy improvement.

Now from pure technology perspective, the successful projects all had some common footprint behind; all IT systems (ERP, CRM, Billing, etc) are involved, over the air access, security and high availability are required. Dont be afraid to spend a bit more Capex to save a lot of Opex later on. You must build your IoT topology based on flexibility and adaptability as new standards, tech components and regulations will fade in.

Keep the long story short, IoT is a fast changing, rather complicated ecosystem. Therefore you need external know-how and consulting partner who will help you build budget, data monetization and manage operational aspects. Your vendors must provide world-class support, integration and implementation help. Do your homework and get ready for vendor and technology immaturity. Assess vendor and tech continuously. Last but not least, contact Tele2 IoT so we can bring world-wide best practices and know-how.

Alper CELIK

Global Sales Manager

TELE2 IoT

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7 lessons learned from real life IoT projects

I am a simple sales guy, working with many different companies across the world, helping them getting their devices connected. I have customers in many different industries such as; telematics, smart metering, asset tracking/monitoring, security, health care, automotive and so on. Working with such a mix, gives me an opportunity to analyze what companies do with their IoT initiatives in different industries. In this blog post, I will share what I see is happening in real life based on my own personal experience.

First of all, many companies are talking about IoT and dreaming to getting their business model changed from selling product to selling solutions/services. Because they want to differentiate their products, get closer to their end customers, better understand how/when/where/why their products are being used etc. I think there is a lot of focus on the technology side of IoT and a lot of companies are lost when it comes to what type of sensory data to be collected and how this data will be converted into increased revenue & reduced costs.

I will divide my experience into 2 separate chapters as Technology and Commercial parts. In my opinion IoT should be very much tied into a commercial goal and just to connect things will not be enough at the end to truly innovate. What I see in real life is that most of the companies start with solving a simple problem, which is nice – as they start small, but missing the big picture of the potential savings/improvements that could be achieved with that specific IoT solution.

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5 Signs for a bad M2M connectivity agreement

M2M and IoT solutions are in many ways all the same; a unique problem and a unique solution. “Where is my truck at the moment? Is my office protected well tonight? How is the patient doing?” All these questions are unique for a customer but there are some common rules that every M2M/IoT solution can benefit from. The solution collects some kind of data, communicates it back to a data centre, the company performs some kind of analysis and compares the results against expected or past performance levels.

Connectivity, in this business flow, is one of the crucial components. While every M2M/IoT solution is specific, there are common needs for a trusted connectivity provider who will cope with your business requirements. But how do you recognize them? I will try to give you 5 big mistakes that will increase your M2M connectivity costs.

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Profitable 4G (LTE) for Telcos

4G (LTE) is just super cool!

I have been using LTE for quite some while and I just love it. It is much faster than even fix line and I do not want to connect to any wi-fi just because my 4G is the best. Yes, this is how i feel about it as an end-user. I love it and I am willing to pay an amount that will not cost me an arm and a leg. But, what is that amount which Telecom operators should ask for?

As a group product manager in a multi-national Swedish telecom operator, this is what a lot of people around me are thinking about. I have made some observations and these are my conclusions for a profitable 4G (LTE) business for Telcos.

4G (LTE) Succcess Factors:
1- wide and functioning coverage
2- wide selection of 4G (LTE) handsets

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Open APIs for Enabling Cloud & M2M Services

Communications service providers (CSPs) are traditionally conservative, more focused on internal product innovation, targets mass-market services rather than niche-oriented. But  CSPs now have a strategic business challenge; they are not growing fast enough. Subscriber numbers are still growing at a high rate in the emerging markets, but this rate is much smaller in developed markets. Here in the Nordics, we see huge competition with brutal price wars and hopeless fight for growing market shares. Meanwhile, competition worldwide has increased tremendously and ARPU (avrg revenue per user) is not keeping pace with the additional network costs associated with modern time, high-bandwidth services like mobile TV, HD video and the likes.

Graph 1- Operators with a commercial web services offering, worldwide

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Telecom Trends 2013

Trends and buzzwords are everywhere. On the other hand the core business of Telcos is shrinking. In such an environment, it is hard to find new revenue sources and keep the revenue figures green. In my world a telco should drive the core business with 100% focus on sales, cost consciousness and internal efficiency however look for alternative revenue sources for the future. In the presentation below, I try to tease you a bit on what might be those alternative revenue sources for Telcos. If you have any questions or comments feel free to contact me. I hope you enjoy it!

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What Does Convergence Mean?

I was thinking about the meaning of convergence in Telecom context this morning. I have came up to see this nice graph developed by VisionMobile. So what do you think are the vision, focal point and the compete based on will look like by 2015?

My guess is vision: connected devices, focal point: software/apps and compete based on: quality of content.

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LTE First Impressions

I would like to share few things around LTE development in Sweden. First of all 4G has been adopted much faster than 3G. Remember that for the first years after introducing 3G, in most markets, there was hardly any data usage. Contrary to that, just like two years after the launch of LTE in Sweden, we are at the data usage level we were at with 3G at 10 years post-launch. I can clearly say we have already skipped the pre-maturity phase entirely.

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Cloud, M2M and Big Data for Telcos

One petabyte a day: That’s how much data BMW’s Connected Drive cars will generate by 2017 reckons BMW Group IT infrastructure chief Mario Müller.

I took out this note while listening BMW group’s Cloud presentation at Telecom Cloud Services Summit at Berlin this year. M2M data will need a lot of IT capacity and the data produced by machines will be a real source of revenue. I realized that a lot of Telcos are still confused when it comes to M2M and Cloud business models. Many invested heavily into the infrastructure and getting ready for a big fight against global giants such as Amazon. Well, sure they can differentiate based on their local market demans but I am a bit sceptical to IaaS, except storage, at all.

I realized that when Telcos talk about M2M it was all about providing connectivity and mainly about infrastructure when it comes to the Cloud. None of the CSPs really talked about Big Data yet. I believe enterprises need more than basic connectivity and infrastructure. I think they need a solution, which will help them create business intelligence and value for them. I think big data analytics and ICT business solutions are the future for CSPs.

Around sixty percent of CSPs fear they’ll be bit-pipe providers in the M2M and Cloud market. To avoid this, they must have the ambition to take some more risk and be more innovative. I do not agree at all – as one Telco professional stated on the panel- “telcos are expected to be evolutionary not revolutionary”. Telcos need to better understand the business value of their offers and be more a complete ICT providers, extracting intelligence from the pipe – instead of simply delivering connection from A to B.

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So you want to be a Cloud provider?

What do you need to be a Cloud provider? You could be a Telco or an IT Reseller. Once you decided that you will provide Cloud services you need these capabilities.

1. A Cloud enabled data center

2. Platforms (app store, SSO, aggregation platform and so on…) to provide cloud

3. Monetize your services

4. Business development capabilities.

I think yet another important questions that you need to answer are;

1. What do we have internally today? (Because a lot of the things listed above can be outsourced as well)

2. Your ability to handle an ecosystem.

3. Your sales channels and capabilities

4. What will make you different? (Easy to do business with, price, quality, or what else…)

5. Applications and Infrastructure is commodity now, so you need to focus on business models and content instead.

Sit and think twice before you make any move towards Cloud. Make a good business case and take meaningful risks. Because the market is still emerging and Cloud is still “nice to have” not “must to have” at the moment.

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