Iot Now Magazine - Feb/Mar 2016

IoT Now: ISSN 2397-2793

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FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 • VOLUME 6 • ISSUE 1

TALKING HEADS Telit’s Ronen Ben Hamou: IoT innovation in a time of shifting boundaries

THE INDUSTRIAL IoT It’s about more than just the IoT

TELEMATICS

SMART CITIES

SMART UTILITIES

SECURE IoT

DATA ANALYTICS

Vehicles and logistics across new delivery chains.

See our Analyst Report at www.iot-now.com

New spaces for living, working and playing. See our Analyst Report at www.iot-now.com

Delivering intelligent utilities to ever-smarter homes. See our Analyst Report at www.iot-now.com

Protecting a planet’s nervous system – and its inhabitants.

See our August/September issue for full details

Extracting insight from the blizzard of data.

See our Analyst Report out in December 2016

PLUS: INDUSTRIAL IoT: Analyst Report Inside! • ORBCOMM launches new satellites • Stream Technologies and Morpho cooperate on eSIMs • Vodafone, Huawei and u-blox trial NB-IoT • Change at the top for Cambridge Wireless • Beecham Research on privacy • Special LoRa supplement • www.iot-now.com

CONTENTS

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13 TALKING HEADS

50

MWC PREVIEW/REVIEW

IN THIS ISSUE 4

EDITOR’S COMMENT The ‘futureshock’ of the IoT is just starting to hit – and the machines have started doing it for themselves

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MARKET NEWS Key IoT trends from 451 Research; Consumer IoT to drive tech revenues to US$287bn; One billion cellular M2M subscribers by 2020 says Berg Insight; New members for Swedish IoT Alliance

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COMPANY NEWS First trial of NB-IoT say Huawei, Vodafone and u-blox; Stream and Morpho cooperate on secure eSIMS; Solair launches new IoT application modules; ORBCOMM takes the high frontier in space WHAT’S HOT ONLINE Who’s going to service the deployed IoT? Sweeter strawberries for Italy and easier parking in New Zealand – thanks to the IoT CONTRACT NEWS & HOT LIST Latest wins for Ingenu, Telenor Connexion and many more

10 PEOPLE NEWS New names at Cambridge Wireless, Silicon Labs, the IMC and others 11

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PRODUCT NEWS Gooee announces gateway for lighting and sensing; Taoglass innovates for automotive; Redpine launches new multi-standard wireless module WHAT’S HOT ON THE GLOBAL IoT NETWORK The IoE and retail – a view from Cisco; Epicor ask if the fourth industrial revolution is here?

TALKING HEADS Teli’s SVP Ronen Ben Hamou on IoT innovation in a time of shifting boundaries INTERVIEW Simon Glassman from u-blox on the roles that NB-IoT can play in speeding IoT adoption

20 EXPERT OPINION George Malim explores recent advances in NB-IoT 22 INTERVIEW Philip Cole of Wireless Logic on market realities – and rapid growth 27 IoT NOW ANALYST REPORT – THE INDUSTRIAL IoT: IT’S ABOUT MORE THAN JUST THE IoT In this edition’s independent Analyst Report, Jim Morrish, founder and chief research officer at Machina Research, drills down into how industry can exploit the IoT 37 EXPERT OPINION Mike Troiano, AT&T’s VP - IoT Solutions, on moving towards real world Industrial IoT deployments 39 INTERVIEW Roberto Siagri and Robert Andres of Eurotech on spacecentric IoT ecosystems 41

EXPERT OPINION Patrick Kuo, CEO, ThroughTek on IoT innovation for surveillance and the smart home market

45 INTERVIEW Tanja Rueckert of business software giant SAP on realising the IoT vision 50 MWC PREVIEW/REVIEW Predictions, news and information from exhibitors 57 CASE STUDY Numerex on a logistics project for a major manufacturer 60 ANALYST REPORT Analysys Mason looks at AT&T’s connected car offerings and strategies 62 IoT MASTERCLASS Beecham Research examines issues of privacy and identity in a connected world 63 IoT MASTERCLASS BlueTC on tailoring connectivity and service levels for IoT applications

IoT Now - February / March 2016

ANALYST REPORT

IoT Now: ISSN 2397-2793

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Cover Sponsor: Telit operates as an enabler of the Internet of Things (IoT). It develops, and markets cellular, GNSS, short-to-long range wireless modules plus mobile connectivity services and application enablement platform to onboard edge devices to the IoT. The company delivers managed and value added services; application enablement; and connectivity management in a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. In addition, the company offers mobile data plans in EMEA and the Americas that are packaged and priced specifically for IoT business models. For the Automotive OEM and tier-one segment, Telit sells modules that are certified and manufactured in compliance with regulations like ISO/TS16949. www.telit.com

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 • VOLUME 6 • ISSUE 1

TALKING

HEADS IoT INDUSTRIAL Telit’s Ronen Ben Hamou: IoT innovation in a time of shifting boundaries

It’s about more than just the IoT….

THE INDUSTRIAL IoT It’s about more than just the IoT

GOLD SPONSOR

TELEMATICS

SMART CITIES

SMART UTILITIES

SECURE IoT

DATA ANALYTICS

Vehicles and logistics across new delivery chains.

See our Analyst Report at www.iot-now.com

New spaces for living, working and playing. See our Analyst Report at www.iot-now.com

Delivering intelligent utilities to ever-smarter homes. See our Analyst Report at www.iot-now.com

Protecting a planet’s nervous system – and its inhabitants.

See our August/September issue for full details

Extracting insight from the blizzard of data.

See our Analyst Report out in December 2016

PLUS: INDUSTRIAL IoT: Analyst Report Inside! • ORBCOMM launches new satellites • Stream Technologies and Morpho cooperate on eSIMs • Vodafone, Huawei and u-blox trial NB-IoT • Change at the top for Cambridge Wireless • Beecham Research on privacy • Special LoRa supplement • www.iot-now.com

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COMMENT

The time traveller’s guide to the IoT?

EDITORIAL ADVISORS

There comes a saddening moment in the life of any self-respecting geek who grew up on a diet of science fiction when they realise that the nearest that they’re ever going to get to time travel is just getting older. Having now completed a full year of editing IoT Now, part of me has become aware that I’m definitely living ‘in the future’ as I look at the waves of IoT now washing across the planet. I and many of the industry experts that I’ve been lucky enough to interview and speak with over that period all seem to have spotted the same trends: the whole sector has now reached a kind of critical mass; the tendrils of the IoT are inevitably reaching into even the most intimate aspects of our lives; and that the future is going to be very, very different to even the recent past.

As always, we’ve tried to reflect some of these changes – and their effects – in this our MWC issue. For a start, in our analyst report, James Morrish of Machina Research, takes a look at the IoT in the manufacturing Alun Lewis, sector, presaging the next editor, IoT Now industrial revolution. Its Magazine repercussions could be as big as the first one and warning voices are already being raised about its possible impact on employment levels, economies and wider society. Powered looms are not up for smashing this time, but change always brings unexpected consequences.

We’ve also chosen to look at developments out in the radio world – specifically NB-IoT and LoRa – and have dedicated a whole supplement to the last. At the risk of sounding paranoid, it does look like the Things have asked for – and got – their very

own network technologies, saving them having to compete with those annoying humans for bandwidth and connectivity.

While we get on with entertaining and advertising ourselves to death in a blizzard of multimedia trivia, our machines can chat in the background to keep the essentials of civilisation - power, water, transport and housing - ticking over smoothly.

Additionally, we’ve got our usual wide range of advice on best practice – such as how to deal with increasingly important issues of identity and privacy in a contribution from an academic expert in this area on page 62.

Finally, it being that time of year again, we’ve also provided a round-up of IoT related activity expected at MWC this year. I hope to meet at least some of you amidst the crowded halls and aisles of that show of shows.

Alun Lewis, Editor, IoT Now Magazine

Olivier Beaujard, vice-president Market Development, Sierra Wireless

Erik Brenneis, head of Vodafone M2M

Alexander Bufalino, CMO, Telit

Robin DukeWoolley, CEO, Beecham Research

Andrew Parker, project marketing director, Connected Living, GSMA

Gert Pauwels, M2M marketing director, Orange Business

Contributors in this issue of IoT Now We are always proud to bring you the best writers and commentators in M2M and IoT. In this issue they include: Jim Morrish Chief Research Officer at Machina Research, Jim has over 20 years’ experience of strategy consulting, operations management and telecoms research

EDITOR Alun Lewis Tel: +44 (0) 1296 660423 a.lewis@wkm-global.com EDITORIAL DIRECTOR & PUBLISHER Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 j.cowan@wkm-global.com DIGITAL SERVICES DIRECTOR Nathalie Millar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 n.millarr@wkm-global.com

Peter Dykes Peter has been in telecoms for over 25 years, both as a freelance and for major publishing and research companies.

Current interests are in IoT and smart cities

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Jameson Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807410 c.jameson@wkm-global.com

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IoT Now is distributed free to selected named individuals worldwide who meet the Publisher's terms of Circulation Control. If you would like to apply for a regular free copy supplied at the Publisher's discretion visit www.iot-now.com If you do not qualify for a free subscription, paid subscriptions can be obtained. Subscriptions for 5 issues per year cost £125.00 worldwide (or US$210 / €160) including post and packing.

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Morgan Mullooly Morgan is an analyst at Analysys Mason’s Digital Economy practice and co-leader of the company’s IoT and M2M Solutions programme

Robert Brunbäck, CMO, Telenor Connexion

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, stored, published or in any way reproduced without the prior written consent of the Publisher.

Bill Zujewski, SVP, IoT Marketing & Strategy, PTC

IoT Now - February / March 2016

MARKET NEWS IoT will drive consumer tech revenues to US$287bn, says Consumer Technology Association

Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, CTA

The CTA unveiled the latest version of its semiannual industry report, U.S. Consumer Technology Sales and Forecasts, on the eve of CES in Las Vegas.

According to the report, smartphones, televisions and laptops will continue to drive U.S. retail revenues and lead to one percent industry growth

in 2016. While these categories – together with tablets and desktops – account for 51% of the consumer tech industry’s revenue, the catalysts for industry growth are newer innovations such as wearables, virtual reality and drones.

“The exponential growth of the IoT and the lightning-fast speed of innovation are key reasons we’ll see such strong growth across so many tech categories, said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, the CTA.

Berg Insight predicts 1 billion cellular M2M subscribers by 2022 According to a new research report from the analyst firm Berg Insight, the global number of cellular M2M subscribers increased by 23% during Tobias Ryberg, 2015 to reach 265.2 Berg Insight million at the end of the year. East Asia was the largest regional market with 90.4 million M2M subscribers, followed by Western

Europe and North America with 59.0 million and 52.5 million respectively.

Over the next five years, the installed base of cellular M2M devices is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.9%.

“Our current view is that the 1 billion milestone for cellular M2M subscribers will be reached in 2022,” said Tobias Ryberg, senior analyst Berg Insight and author of the report.

IHS says automotive display systems to grow to US$18.6bn by 2021, driven by connectivity, infotainment, safety

Mark Boyadjis, IHS Automotive

Driven by continued innovation in vehicle connectivity and safety technologies, global revenue from automotive display systems will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 11% to US$18.6 billion by the end of 2021, adding nearly US$9 billion in annual revenue

compared to 2015, according to IHS Inc. “The automotive displays supply chain will see some amazing growth and innovation through the end of the decade, as more vehicles debut new displays or standardise larger ones in the instrument cluster, centre stack and head-up display systems,” said Mark Boyadjis, senior analyst and manager for Infotainment and HMI at IHS Automotive.

Telematics will “uber-ise” the auto insurance industry, says PTOLEMUS’ new UBI study PTOLEMUS Consulting Group has released the 2016 edition of its usagebased insurance global study by offering a free, 125-page abstract. With 230 active programmes and 12 million customers, Usage-Based Insurance (UBI) is now a truly Frederic global phenomenon that Bruneteau, PTOLEMUS reaches twice as many countries as two years ago. By 2020, nearly 100 million vehicles globally will be insured with telematics policies. This will grow to

IoT Now - February / March 2016

nearly 50% of the world’s vehicles by 2030, generating more than €250 billion in premiums for insurers.

Frederic Bruneteau, managing director, says: “Now that ultra-low cost solutions are available, such as smartphone apps, embedded car or aftermarket devices, insurers have no excuse to procrastinate any more. Change has come out of the box and will not go back into it! Like Uber, this will radically transform the business model of auto insurance, from underwriting to claims management.

The days of insurers who rely on purely statistical models are numbered.”

New analysis of the IoT market predicts key trends for 2016 from 451 Research 451 Research has now released its 2016 IoT Preview Report. While communications protocols, security, competing WAN approaches and data management remain concerns, early adopters are focusing on muchneeded business process changes required to fully exploit the Internet of Things.

In the report, 451 Research identifies the key challenges facing this emerging sector: business process changes will continue to be the largest barrier to IoT adoption; edge communication protocols will remain fragmented; the LTE-M timing gap and new LPWAN upstarts will force the hand of operators; the data generated by ‘things’ will challenge storage, cloud, analytics and visualisation vendors; while security continues to be a source of major concern. On the brighter side, pricing for IoT components is rapidly declining, bringing IoT deployments within reach of a larger audience.

NEWS IN BRIEF Narrative, Ngenic, Tinitell and EWA Solutions join the Swedish IoT Alliance SMSE The Swedish Alliance for IoT Entrepreneurs (SMSE) has welcomed four new members: Narrative, Ngenic, Tinitell and EWA Solutions.

The latest expansion brings SMSE to 48 members and 14 partners and indicates a growing and fullyfunctioning IoT ecosystem in Sweden.

“Sweden has become a hotbed for IoT across industries and our alliance fuel that development,” said Magnus Melander, the founder of SMSE. “SMSE makes it easy to navigate in the Swedish IoT eco-system which is reflected in increasing interest, visits and partnerships from key international IoT players and media.”

Robots to reside in more than 10% of US households by 2020, finds Juniper Research New data from Juniper Research has forecast that over one in ten American households will own a consumer robot by the end of the decade, up from under one in 25 this year. At this early stage in the market, shipments are expected to be dominated by socalled ‘task’ oriented robots assigned to take over household chores, such as lawn mowing or vacuum cleaning.

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COMPANY NEWS Vodafone, Huawei and u-blox claim ‘first successful commercial trial’ of pre-standard NB-IoT Vodafone Group, Huawei, and u-blox have completed the first successful commercial trial of prestandard NB-IoT (Narrowband Internet of Things). Vodafone and Matt Beal, Huawei successfully Vodafone integrated the technology into the operator’s existing mobile network in Spain and then sent the first pre-standard NB-IoT message to a ublox module installed in a water meter.

Matt Beal, director of Innovation and Architecture, Vodafone Group, commented: “Vodafone has led the development of NB-IoT, the LPWA technology in licensed spectrum that has gained huge industry support. The completion of this first commercial trial with our partners is further evidence of that. Once commercialised, NB-IoT will provide tangible benefits for our enterprise customers, principally making it feasible to connect more devices to the IoT.”

Stream and Morpho cooperate on eSIM deployments Stream Technologies and Morpho, the security specialists, have announced a new collaboration to offer Stream’s award winning IoT-X management platform and global connectivity with the MorphoFlex™ subscription management solution. When used in combination with eSIMS, MorphoFlex will enable the remote provisioning and change of localised cellular connectivity for globally deployed devices via a simple and secure bridge for MNOs anywhere in the world.

Yves Portalier, VP and general manager for the Telecom Business Unit at Morpho (Safran), explained, “With the growing global number of IoT devices, this combined solution of MorphoFlex and Stream’s IoT-X easily and securely reduces supply chain complexity and eases multinational deployment of new categories of devices.”

RealVNC extends long term collaboration with Volkswagen As a supplier of MirrorLink to automotive and mobile manufacturers, RealVNC work very closely with Volkswagen and all major mobile phone OEMs to Tom Blackie, Real VNC provide a mature, highperformance MirrorLink implementation. The company has now declared their commitment to Volkswagen to refine and perfect the overall end-toend user experience for MirrorLink enabled devices.

Audi partners with Cubic Telecom to deliver connected vehicles with infotainment and Wi-Fi across Europe Cubic Telecom and Audi have announced a partnership to bring Audi’s connected car infotainment services to drivers across Europe. The partnership will deliver robust, low-cost connectivity for more than a million Audi drivers, with customers not only able to access Audi infotainment services, but also purchase competitive regional or Europe-wide bundled connectivity plans to give them access to Wi-Fi, personal apps and more across Cubic Telecom’s LTE network

covering 13 countries.

“We are thrilled to Barry Napier, partner with Audi to Cubic Telecom provide its drivers with in-car connectivity,” said Barry Napier, CEO of Cubic Telecom.

“This partnership is a testament to Cubic Telecom’s ability to rapidly expand connectivity programs for users across not only Europe, but global markets as our solution can be easily scaled worldwide.”

Solair announces seven new IoT software application modules “Having analysed the real needs of our customers, we decided to reconfigure our offering, to augment it and to Tom Davis, simplify accessibility to CEO, Solair our technology,” said Tom Davis, CEO at Solair. “The result is a new suite of seven software modules inspired by the most requested IoT applications on the market.”

The suite consists of seven modules,

with each module a product that performs a specific function. The foundation module focuses on managing the key elements of an IoT application: collecting data from products, sending it to the cloud, transforming it into information. The six other modules are designed to standardise processes and to manage specific conditions, e.g. preventive maintenance, product life cycle, spare parts, stocks and engineering data management.

ORBCOMM announces the successful launch of its 11 OG2 satellites ORBCOMM Inc. has successfully launched eleven next generation OG2 satellites from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. “Today marks a significant milestone for our company.

I’d like to congratulate SpaceX on making history by landing the Falcon 9’s reusable Stage one booster from a record altitude. It’s an exciting day for all of us in the space industry,” said Marc Eisenberg, ORBCOMM’s CEO. ORBCOMM’s OG2 satellites are

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“We are thrilled to announce our collaboration with Volkswagen and to play a key role in ensuring that the millions of Volkswagen cars enabled with MirrorLink work well with all mobile devices”, said Tom Blackie, VP of Automotive and Mobile at RealVNC. “It’s reassuring to see major mobile phone manufacturers, especially in China and Asia, embracing MirrorLink and even more so as most are now using our technology. Expect to see many new product announcements in the coming weeks and months.”

designed to provide significant enhancements, such as faster message delivery, larger message sizes and better coverage Marc Eisenberg, at higher latitudes, while ORBCOMM also significantly increasing network capacity. The OG2 satellites are equipped with an AIS payload to receive and report transmissions from AIS-equipped vessels for ship tracking and other maritime navigational and safety efforts.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

WHAT’S HOT ONLINE

www. iot-now.com Who will service the billions of IoT devices?

As the Internet of Things (IoT) converges with servitisation, machine-to-machine learning, 3D printing and cloud adoption, one of the biggest considerations is going to be around service.

Whether it’s a kettle or an MRI machine, all of these billions and billions of connected smart devices are going to need servicing. This not only impacts the field service industry, but will also completely redefine it over the longer term along with people’s expectations around service delivery, says Mark Homer is vice president of Global Customer Transformation for field service management specialist, ServiceMax.

As devices and gadgets become connected, service will move from reactive product insight to providing predictive alerts, triggering service technicians with the right skills to be deployed to the right place before a fault takes place with preventative maintenance, or in the event that something occurs.

www.iot-now.com (Search for: servitisation)

Fruitless search for a parking space could be at an end for drivers in New Zealand capital Smart Parking has concluded negotiations with Wellington City Council and has been awarded the NZ$1.4 million, five-year contract for the provision of 3,000 parking sensors in the Wellington CBD street parking areas.

The parking solution will also include Smart Parking’s SmartApp which will allow motorists to identify and be directed to streets with available bays avoiding driving around searching for a spot on roads which are already full.

trial of 72 V2sensors carried out earlier in the year in Allen Street, with the Council also trialling Palmerston North-based Frog Parking.

Speaking about the contract win, Paul Gillespie, Smart Parking CEO said: “The SmartPark solution will now make it easier for drivers to find a parking space, which means also reducing congestion and cutting vehicle emissions.”

www.iot-now.com (Search for: Wellington)

This project follows a successful Smart Parking

‘Smart’ strawberries crop increases the quality and reduces time from farm to market Strawberries are widely appreciated for their characteristic aroma, bright red colour, juicy texture, and sweetness. But this fruit must also be eaten as soon as possible because it does not keep well.

Italy is the fourth highest producer of strawberries in Europe (around 140,000 tons), on a surface of 3,700 ha, 80% of which take place inside covered spaces. Greenhouses are located in the northeast of the Emilia Romagna Region, one of the most important horticultural areas in Italy, both for variety and quality of the products.

In terms of strawberry production, the common goals of the growers are to shorten the time between pick and sell and to increase the quality of the berries (especially appearance and flavour). The recent trends are a rising number of farmers that sell their products on their own and more interest in using smart solutions for a continuous control of the factors affecting quality.

Ready data to avoid losses Both these parameters have to be constantly maintained within optimum ranges, in order to avoid loss of product that otherwise can reach up to the 80% of the yield, caused by the presence of misshapen, plant collapsed and small fruit.

Farmers therefore need to know the level of greenhouse temperature and soil water content many times a day, in order to make decisions about temperature management and water supply. Famosa is an Italian company specialising in innovative crop management and has chosen Libelium’s Waspmote Plug&Sense! Smart Agriculture to develop a solution that monitors greenhouse field sensors with continuous data control from a wireless system able to connect sensors with the cloud.

www.iot-now.com (search for: strawberries)

hello@arkessa.com • +44 1279 799270

IoT Now - February / March 2016

arkessa.com

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CONTRACT NEWS Ingenu and WellAware expand Machine Network to provide new coverage in Texas

John Horn, Ingenu

Ingenu and WellAware have announced a collaboration that will add approximately 55,000 square miles of coverage to the network’s footprint.

Covering the greater Texas geographic area,

the public network, powered by Ingenu’s RPMA® communications technology, will serve a variety of industries, including WellAware’s oil and gas applications.

“The solid partnership with WellAware has enabled Ingenu to accelerate its Machine Network build-

out strategy in the Southern U.S.,” said Ingenu CEO, John Horn.

“WellAware has developed extremely innovative, secure and reliable solutions based on our RPMA technology, and we will continue to collaborate and extend the Machine Network as they expand.”

Telenor Connexion signs deals for Chinese shipping and Husqvarna lawnmowers CIMC MIoT Ltd, part of China International Marine Containers Group Ltd., has signed a global agreement with Telenor Connexion to provide them with a solution involving global coverage and multioperator set up to optimise network access.

“CIMC is the largest container manufacturing company in the world

and we are proud to be associated with this brand and to have the opportunity to deliver our solution to this prominent company”, said Mats Lundquist, CEO of Telenor Connexion.

Additionally, Husqvarna Group, has selected Telenor Connexion as its global connectivity partner for the next generation of connected robotic lawn mowers and associated

services. Telenor Connexion will supply Husqvarna Group with a Mats managed connectivity Lundquist, solution that automates Telenor the delivery and Connexion management of services to the connected devices, including a global SIM, access to a Service Portal and a proactive 365/24/7 IoT dedicated Service Desk.

THE CONTRACT HOT LIST IoT Now February/March 2016 It's free to be included in The Contract Hot List, which shows the companies announcing recent contract wins, acquisitions or deployments. Email your contract details to us now, marked "Hot List" at <j.cowan@wkm-global.com> Vendor/Partners 3Cinteractive Airbiquity Altair Aeris Arkessa Axiros Connected Vehicle Association Cubic Telecom Cyan Cyan Device Solutions Ericsson Essence Huawei Ingenu Kii KORE KORE Libelium LinkLabs McCourt Microlise Microlise Microlise NXP PTC RealVNC SIGFOX SIGFOX Splunk Synchronoss Telenor Connexion Telenor Connexion Telenor Connexion Telensa Telit Truphone Wyless

Client, Country Wyless Arynga Korea Telecom G&D Tixi.com, Germany Stadtwerk Konstanz, Germany MusiComms, USA Audi, Europe Newcapec, China Enzen Global Solutions, India FokusLabs Volvo Cars GetSafe, USA Beltelecom, Belarus WellAware, USA Toshiba DipJar T-Mobile IBM Bluemix LPRS, UK Skyware ARYZTA, UK MAN, Middle East and Africa Morrisons, UK Freescale Kepware, USA Volkswagen OVH Groupe La Poste, France Graphmasters, Germany OnStar Chinese CIMC MIoT Kamstrup Husqvarna Gloucester Council, UK Morpho CoSwitched, UK T-Mobile

Key: AIS = Automatic Identification System

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EV = Electric Vehicle M2M = Machine-to-Machine

Product / Service (Duration & Value) Messaging for IoT Connected car software updates LTE connectivity for smart meters and tracking Secure IoT connectivity Connectivity for Field Bus and PLC monitoring Zero-touch IoT device management Connected car music delivery needs Connected vehicle infotainment and WiFi connectivity Smart metering Smart metering Anti-distraction wearables development Intelligent media streaming for driverlass cars Domestic security Smart home solutions Oil and gas connectivity Wearable tracking connectivity and platform Cashless tipping Continued 2G IoT support to 2020 Sensor integration for smart cities LoRa-based products distribution deal Acquisition in satellite connectivity Fleet management and telematics Telematics solution partnership Telematics solution Acquisition Acquisition - industrial automation connectivity Mobile connectivity Data analysis platform integration Remote ordering service Route optimisation analytics M-commerce and cloud for Connected cars Global logistics and tracking Smart metering Robot lawn mower support Smart street lighting control IoT emergency response in Russia Acquisition of connectivity management platform Continued 2G IoT support to 2020 PaaS = Platform as a Service RFID = Radio Frequency Identification

Awarded 12.2015 1.2016 12.2015 12.2015 11.2015 12.2015 1.2016 1.2016 12.2015 12.2015 1.2016 1.2016 1.2016 12.2015 1.2016 12.2015 1.2016 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015 1.2016 1.2016 1.2016 1.2016 1.2016 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015 12.2015

SIM = Subscriber Identity Module TTM = Time-to-Market

IoT Now - February / March 2016

locate, communicate, accelerate

Narrowband N b d Io IoT â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the technology that makes things SSmart. www.u-b blox.com/NB-IoT/

PEOPLE NEWS

Brandon Tolany joins Silicon Labs as senior VP of worldwide sales

Brandon Tolany

In this role, Mr. Tolany becomes responsible for driving Silicon Labs’ revenue growth through global sales and distribution channel development and strategic OEM customer activities. “I am thrilled to start the New Year with this exciting challenge – leading the worldwide sales and distribution organisation for one of the most dynamic innovators in the Internet of Things market,” said Tolany. “I look forward to leading Silicon Labs’

global sales team as we deliver best-in-class connectivity solutions to our many thousands of customers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific regions.”

Prior to joining Silicon Labs, Mr. Tolany served as senior VP, chief sales and marketing officer at Freescale Semiconductor.

David Cleevely steps down as chair of Cambridge Wireless - Samsung’s Raj Gawera takes charge

David Cleevely and Raj Gawera

David Cleevely, CBE, FREng, is stepping down as chair of Cambridge Wireless after 15 years in the role since the organisation was founded as Cambridge 3G to drive the emerging mobile industry in the UK. David will be replaced by Raj Gawera who is VP and managing director of Samsung Cambridge and Samsung Aalborg.

David will remain as a member of the CW board.

CW is now recognised as an international community for companies involved in the research, development and application of wireless, mobile and internet, semiconductor and software

technologies, with over 400 members from all over the world.

“I’m both honoured and excited to be appointed in this role and receive the baton from David’s extremely capable hands at a pivotal time for the wireless industry,” said Raj Gawera. “We stand on the brink of a complete reboot of the whole wireless industry with a maturing and consolidating smartphone-centric market making way for a mix of new core technologies and innovative business models under the IoT banner. However, not all newcomers to the IoT party will be successful.”

GlobalPlatform announces its Board of Directors

Marc Kekicheff

GlobalPlatform, the secure chip standards body, has that Marc Kekicheff, senior director of Chip Innovation at Visa Inc., retains his position as GlobalPlatform chairman for the sixth consecutive year. Nils Gerhardt, group VP at Giesecke & Devrient, joins the Board as GlobalPlatform’s new vice chair. Yves Moulart, director of development and innovation within ST Microelectronic’s Secure MCUs Division, retains his role as GlobalPlatform’s secretary/treasurer.

Rob Coombs, security marketing director, Systems

& Software, ARM; Rémi de Fouchier, VP, marketing at Gemalto; and Sebastian Hans, principal member of Technical Staff at Oracle were relected. Stéphanie El Rhomri, VP, technology at FIME is newly elected.

Marc Kekicheff commented: “GlobalPlatform’s success is based on the diversity, experience and expertise of its membership and the new Board reflects that diversity and authority. A key priority for the organisation in 2016 is the adoption of the GlobalPlatform TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) Certification Scheme by different vertical markets.”

Telit CMO Alexander Bufalino voted chairman of the IoT M2M Council

Alexander Bufalino

“The IMC has reached critical mass in terms of its size with over 15,000 members,” said Bufalino. “In 2016 we’ll be turning our attention to providing them with opportunities to interact with each other and learn more about successful IoT business models. To this end, the IMC has just begun producing webinars for its members on hot-button topics like systems integration, security, and new low-power technologies, in addition to providing case studies, newsletters, and other content.”

Bufalino was chosen, in part, for his more than 15 years of experience in marketing solutions for embedded systems, including stints at Siemens and EnOcean, before his current 10-year period at Telit.

“Alex is an industry visionary, and we look forward to working with him to take the IMC to the next level, in terms of the value the organisation provides,” said IMC executive director, Keith Kreisher.

Former Emulex CEO Jeffrey Benck joins Lantronix as president and CEO Networking company Lantronix, a provider of smart IoT and M2M connectivity solutions, has appointed Jeffrey W. Benck as president and CEO of the company.

Jeff Benck

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"Lantronix has innovative technology that is needed by the industry to enable otherwise unconnected

machines to communicate with the rest of the world, just as the 'Internet of Things' moves into its broad adoption phase,” said Benck. He holds an MSc. in management of technology from University of Miami and a BSc. degree in mechanical engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

PRODUCT NEWS Taoglas - antenna innovation for the Vehicle-to-Vehicle market

Gooee announces enterprise IoT gateway for lighting and sensing Developed to include features such as a cloud-integrated OS, the gateway supports multiple communication protocols including Bluetooth, Zigbee and WiFi chips, along with both an Ethernet and Serial port. The gateway will run Gooee’s Bluetooth Mesh, purpose-engineered for lighting and sensing end-points.

Gooee’s CTO, Simon Coombes, explains, “Many hub and gateway manufacturers claim their devices support thousands of end-points, in some cases tens of thousands. That might be possible if you need a limited amount of control and are just turning

groups of lights on and off. At Gooee, we are dealing with individual end-point control and a vast sensory network generating Simon Coombes, Gooee large quantities of environmental and energy data, so our gateway is designed for this kind of enterprise scale.”

Redpine Signals launches wireless MCU Module with Dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth Low Energy, and ZigBee Support Redpine Signals today announced the launch of what they state is the world’s first wireless microcontroller module with built-in support for multiple wireless protocols including WiFi, Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth Low Energy, and ZigBee. The WiSeMCU modules include the RS10001 – an ultra-small 8.6 x 8.6 mm wireless MCU with singleband Wi-Fi, dual-mode BT, ZigBee, and a 100 MHz ARM Cortex M4. By combining the processor with multi-protocol

wireless support, Redpine Signals is making it easier for mobile and IoT product designers to build next-gen products with seamless connectivity.

The WiSeMCU module family is fully certified and comes with a comprehensive development kit with extensive software libraries, example projects, cloud access and support for multiple development environments.

The Taoglas DCP.5900 supports the latest communications technology for vehicles – DSRC (dedicated shortrange communications) - enabling two-way short-to-medium range wireless communications which are critical for active safety applications. The antenna operates from 5850MHz to 5925MHz, fully covering the spectrum allocated for DSRC by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI.) Using these frequencies, DSRC will enable cars to communicate with each other and alert drivers to roadside hazards ahead.

“For DSRC devices, antenna performance is essential – these devices need to work at all times, even in the toughest RF environments. With safety applications there’s no room for error,” said Dermot O’Shea, Taoglas joint CEO. “The DCP.5900 has an efficiency of 75% and works in rugged environments, even providing continuing connectivity in harsh weather conditions such as sub-zero or very high temperatures.”

Taoglas DCP.5900

WiSeMCU Module

OPINION

SPONSORED COLUMN

IoT Enablement technology is here. Now Innovate!

In its January 9-15, 2016 issue, The Economist featured a review of “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” in its Books and Arts section. The book from American economist Robert Gordon received great praise from the magazine’s editorial staff for Mr. Gordon’s arguments, particularly on the parallel he draws between the Internet and the decade after the Civil War when innovation took off led by inventions including the motor car and electricity. In his book, Mr. Gordon discusses the increase in the speed of change, citing as examples, how in the 30 years ending in 1900, American railways were adding 20 miles of new tracks every day and mail order company Sears & Roebuck was shipping 100,000 orders a day from a thousand page catalog.

In so many ways, we are living something similar to that era now with the Internet of Things. The power packed by the IoT is in fact so massive that the organisers of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland made the decision to dedicate the event to what they call “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”. The organisers of this prestigious event go as far as saying that this revolution “not only will change what people do, it

will change who they are”.

Electricity and cars enabled a revolution unleashing an era of innovation. The IoT has the same potential as an enabler. But what we are missing is the passion and drive to innovate that we saw in the early 1900s. Now that IoT technology is here, let’s go innovate and deliver the much anticipated revolution.

Alexander Bufalino, CMO, Telit

IoT Now - February / March 2016

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WHAT’S HOT ON IOT GLOBAL NETWORK

IoE will help retailers create the intelligent high street In 2015, we saw a continuation in the decline of consumers visiting local high streets, writes Sarah Eccleston, the director for Enterprise Networks at Cisco UK and Ireland. November alone saw a 2.1% reduction on the previous year in what is usually expected to be one of the busier retail months, with consumers favouring the ease of online shopping and the thrill of getting themselves the best bargains from the comfort of their home. As such, the current challenge for UK retailers is all too easy to see.

The subsequent rise in online retailing, which reached double digit growth in September, according to the latest figures from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, has put increasing pressure on retail business owners to mirror the often seamless and consumer friendly in-store experience through new, digital channels.

What’s more, we’re increasingly seeing online and offline come together to improve the retail

experience, in turn opening up new and interesting ways to engage with customers. The Internet of Everything (IoE), for example, is enabling retailers to go above and beyond consumer expectations by creating an intelligent high street that combines online and physical realms.

Read the rest of this two-part article at www.iotglobalnetwork.com (Search for: Eccleston)

Sarah Eccleston, Cisco Systems

Jedi-OT knights and the SIM-less wonders Long ago, in a cellular galaxy not too far away, this ubiquitous device was specified by ETSI and in 1991 the first batch were produced by G&D. It provides secure, authenticated access for billions of people globally to cellular networks and is, of course, the dear old SIM card. This invention has been a vital enabler for the growth of mobile

telephony but has it done the same for M2M? And will it do so for the IoT in the future, asks David Parker, senior analyst with Beecham Research.

Read the full blog at

www.iotglobalnetwork.com (Search for: Beecham)

Life on the cusp of Industry 4.0 – the fourth Industrial Revolution Manufacturing has come a long way since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century, writes Martin Hill, vice president of marketing at Epicor International. The second Industrial Revolution in the 1900s saw the introduction of mass production. In the late 1960s, electronics and the automation of production lines entered the industrial environment. Now, we are benefiting

from robotics and are beginning to discover the value of 3D printing. We are on the cusp of Industry 4.0, the fourth Industrial Revolution.

Read the full blog at

www.iotglobalnetwork.com (Search for: Epicor)

Why the IoT could transform how we view sheep While the IoT can quite rightly be criticised for the amount of hype it has generated in the last two or three years, look a little more closely and you will find a range of practical applications, writes James Wickes, the co-founder of Cloudview. Some are still in the development stage, such as Lancaster University’s research into countryside applications which may see the fitting of digital collars onto sheep and, more topically, placing sensors on riverbanks and

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installing rain flow and river flow monitors. Other applications may be less headline-grabbing but offer immediate benefits provided that organisations maintain appropriate security.

Read the full blog at

www.iotglobalnetwork.com (Search for: CCTV)

IoT Now - February / March 2016

TALKING HEADS

Ronen Ben-Hamou is EVP, IoT Technologies & Solutions at Telit, having joined the company towards the end of 2015 after a period as COO and head of R&D at the Modems Business Unit of Ericsson. Before that, he held a number of senior roles with Infineon Technologies.

“We’re all constrained in our thinking and planning by the maps that we use – both the ones in the physical world and the ones we carry in our heads”

The challenges of navigating the converging landscapes of the IoT The IoT presents its own unique challenges when compared to past innovation waves in the communications and IT sectors. Historically, technologies were generally developed for specific applications or markets, with clearly defined boundaries, functions and business models supporting them. The endpoints – the fixed telephone handsets, the computers, the mobile devices – were all well understood and networks and information flows could largely be visualised in two-dimensional ways.

The constantly expanding universe of the IoT could not be more different. Multi-dimensional value chains, complex and diverse network topologies, data flows measured by the petabyte and the involvement of many different subindustries, each moving at their own speed, present an awesome challenge for anyone trying to coordinate the rollout of commercial solutions – and anticipate the impact of new technologies across a range of different disciplines.

only to be able to spot early on those areas that are going to differentiate and repay investment, but what the timescales on each are going to be.

Managing innovation successfully remains the hardest challenge for a company of any size, especially if you have a potentially large budget to play with. The IoT environment is no different – some components are being commoditised over time and innovation is shifting to other areas of the value-chain.

IoT Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, recently sat down with Ronen Ben-Hamou, EVP, IoT Technologies and Solutions at Telit, to talk through this constantly shifting landscape and get a feel for the directions that Telit was taking and what influences were at work on the wider industry.

We’re all constrained in our thinking and planning by the maps that we use – both the ones in the physical world and the ones we carry in our heads. Anyone who has ever been involved with the military knows how dangerous a map can be in inexperienced hands – and how unchallenged assumptions about the terrain, the enemy, supply logistics and the competence of the teams involved can quickly turn a potential victory into dismal and bloody defeat.

RB-H: For me, this new and much more direct involvement with the IoT is a natural development. In my previous roles, especially when leading large scale core technology R&D, you need a well-developed personal radar not

In this context, one of the implicit problems with the continuously evolving multi-dimensional value-chain of the IoT is that many of the players on both sides of vendor-customer relationships are navigating with outdated or redundant maps.

One of my key roles with Telit involves expanding the company’s portfolio of products, services and solutions, enhancing the depth and richness of

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IoT Now: Ronen, you joined Telit last autumn after a distinguished career largely in communication technologies with companies like Ericsson and Infineon. How do you see this background as fitting in with both Telit’s own strategy and the evolution of the IoT?

IN ASSOCIATION WITH TELIT IoT Now - February / March 2016

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TALKING HEADS

The sensor data – be it temperature, humidity, motion, light, and so on – was transferred to the cloud for monitoring and controlling purposes

If you look at Telit’s approach and portfolio, it is transforming these IoT visions and ideas into reality. Through our triple play of a wide range of hardware modules, connectivity services and a feature-rich platform, we help our customers to significantly reduce their overall IoT project costs and provide a faster return for their businesses.

IoT Now: One aspect of this that struck me a few years ago was the importance of new technologies in the world of sensors – effectively the eyes, ears, noses, skin – and even potentially tongues - of the IoT universe where the virtual world met the physical. What’s Telit’s take on this area?

RB-H: You’re right – and I believe your analogy to the human body is an accurate one. A few years back, thanks to MEMS for example, the IoT world has just started to scratch the surface of what is possible, integrating basic sensors with simple one-dimensional functionalities. The sensor data – be it temperature, humidity, motion, light, and so on – was transferred to the cloud for monitoring and controlling purposes. However, with further innovation and the introduction of more advanced sensors and actuators, the edge device is also evolving in its role and functionality.

In addition to collecting sensor data and transferring it to the cloud, the edge device will have embedded intelligence to analyse the data and act – to save battery power, when communication with the cloud is lost, or in case of emergencies, to name just a few reasons.

We at Telit are closely following developments in this area and are committed to allowing our customers to exploit its full potential through our internal R&D, as well as partnerships with other companies, including start-ups, and academia.

Let me give you just one practical example. With MEMS sensors and advanced algorithms developed at Telit, we now offer MEMS-only dead reckoning (MoDR) GNSS modules – more information available at www.telit.com/dead_reckoning/. These products allow continuous navigation in tunnels, parking lots, urban canyons and other such cases where satellite reception is lost. This is translating sensor

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innovation to increase value-add to our customers and enable a whole new range of applications.

IoT Now: If that’s the edge – what of the network itself – both local and wide area?

RB-H: We have to distinguish between two different aspects affecting it – market segments and communication technologies. The IoT covers a wide range of market segments with diversity in type of edge devices, their geographical location and mapping, sensors and actuators, collected data, content and frequency of data transmitted to and from the cloud, security profiles, and so on. These all affect the role of the network in the IoT world, with different topologies being needed. When it comes to those communication technologies that form the network, we are in the midst of the evolution – and later convergence - of the technologies needed to meet the unique and challenging requirements of the many IoT market segments.

Such evolution is crucial to reach and support billions of connected devices.

In the wide area context, this is a space that’s become really exciting again. On the one hand we have the ETSI/3GPP/operator community in the licensed frequencies with widely deployed networks, making the first steps in evolving towards IoT optimised technologies such as LTEM and NB-IoT, along with spectrum refarming already taking place in some countries. This is only natural, as cellular operators are looking to extract the maximum value from their investments in radio spectrum. On the other hand, we have newly emerged technologies such as SIGFOX and LoRa to address the needs of markets that can benefit from Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) options. While these technologies are optimised in cost and power for IoT, they are new and we face the inevitable challenges involved in deploying a new technology and creating complementary eco-systems with sufficient scale. Telit is absolutely agnostic in this aspect of the IoT as we clearly recognise that one-size-fits-all approaches are redundant in a market distinguished by its diversity. We offer modules and solutions covering wide range of technologies, enabling full flexibility to our customers.

On the local side, things are similarly active – and Telit’s commitment to offering the maximum ▼

our own maps, helping customers and partners understand their own topographies better and identifying areas for investment, improvement and innovation.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

choice to our customers – and, in turn, their customers - is represented well by our acquisition at the start of 2016 of significant intellectual property in the Bluetooth and NFC areas from Stollmann in Germany. The evolution of the Bluetooth standard to now include Bluetooth Smart as well as ongoing work to extend its range and add functionality such as mesh networking, position Bluetooth as one of the key technologies for future short-range IoT networks. The integration of Bluetooth Smart-ready, Bluetooth Smart and NFC technologies into our portfolio brings further value to our customers and partners by enabling a wide range of end-to-end solutions which can address different market segments.

IoT Now: You mentioned that real convergence – an often abused and overused word – is finally happening. What are the signs that you see?

RB-H: Before we can announce the winners, I think we need to take a step back and acknowledge the sheer complexity of the end-to-end solutions that we are talking about. Not only are many different topologies of IoT networks and solutions possible - and needed in order to enable cost-effective applications across different market segments – but we still today face a fragmented reality in almost every layer of the solution: communication technologies, routing protocols, operating systems, application frameworks. And that list goes on and on. Stepping back for a moment, history has shown that in most cases convergence inevitably happens, irrespective of whether it is driven by standardisation bodies or commercial companies creating it de-facto based on their market share.

The need for convergence in IoT to enable interoperability, and in turn economy of scale, has long been discussed. While this need is accurate, I think we have to face the reality that it isn’t exactly around the corner yet but, nevertheless, this won’t stop organisations trying to take advantage of the IoT today in order to stay relevant and competitive. This is where Telit’s role and abilities are becoming critical to our customers – not only through our wide range of products but, just as importantly, being a triple play provider of tightly integrated hardware modules, connectivity services and a platform that encourages them to start the journey towards an IoT-enabled world.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

Ronen Ben-Hamou, EVP, IoT Technologies & Solutions, Telit,

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INTERVIEW

An avalanche of initiatives related to low power wireless networking hit the IoT industry during 2015. At the end of that year, the 3GPP announced that the leading players in the telecom industry had agreed to develop a joint new standard for IoT communications based on existing mobile network infrastructure. The Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) standard is now in the final stage of development and should become commercially available by the end of this year. Tobias Ryberg of analyst firm Berg Insight speaks to Simon Glassman, head of Strategic Partnerships, EMEA, u-blox, about the new standard and the opportunities it creates.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH U-BLOX

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IoT Now - February / March 2016

â&#x2013;ź

NB-IoT â&#x20AC;&#x201C; another option in the IoT toolbox

NB-IoT is one of several technologies that u-blox is developing to drive innovation in IoT. We are also planning to launch LTE CAT 1 products during 2016 and LTE-M products in future

SG: IoT represents a major shift in the strategic thinking of mobile technology development. Historically, all improvements from 2G to 3G and 4G were entirely focused on achieving higher data speeds. A few years ago there was a realisation that the Internet of Things will require a very different set of technologies when compared with the traditional smartphone use-case. A smartphone is designed for sending and receiving massive amounts of data during the day and being recharged during the night. IoT devices on the other hand typically send small amounts of data and may be required to operate on a single coin-cell battery for many years. In addition, the IoT market is highly sensitive to cost. The 3GPP has addressed these challenges with a number of initiatives aimed at improving its existing mobile technology standards. Cat 1/Cat 0 are existing enhancements to LTE that reduce the cost, complexity and power consumption of 4G devices. LTE-M and EC-GSM are two further tweaks to existing standards that will optimise LTE and GSM respectively for IoT. NB-IoT is specifically designed to offer a platform for ultra-low cost, low throughput use cases. The standard is designed to coexist with LTE and can be deployed in-band utilising resource blocks within normal LTE carrier or standalone for deployments in dedicated spectrum.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

IoT Now: What unique use cases can NB-IoT address?

SG: Reducing cost and power consumption while increasing coverage are the principal drivers behind the development of NB-IoT. There is a wide range of IoT application areas where mass adoption is held back by the inability to meet one or more of these requirements. Smart cities and smart agriculture are amongst the biggest greenfield opportunities that require new network infrastructure and ultra-low cost radios in order to take off. For smart metering, NB-IoT offers great potential to expand the addressable market. The cost of adding communication capabilities to a utility meter is still too high outside of most developed economies. In the case of gas and water meters, power consumption is also a critical factor as they are generally battery powered. Last, but not least, network coverage is a constant issue in smart metering rollouts all over the world. Meters have a very strong tendency to turn up in difficult locations such as in cellars, deep underground or in remote rural areas.

Simon Glassman, head of Strategic Partnerships, EMEA, u-blox

When it comes to consumer applications, NBIoT offers the ability to connect devices directly to the Internet without using a tethered link via the user’s smartphone.

Wearables, medical sensors and GPS trackers are some examples of device categories where NB-IoT could provide tethering.

Household appliances are another potential area of application. The world’s largest white

▼

IoT Now: What’s the background to the NBIoT initiative for the mobile industry and how does it fit into the wider picture of 4G and 5G mobile technology?

17

INTERVIEW

NB-IoT is a part of the wider cellular M2M/IoT ecosystem where key players include mobile operators, network infrastructure vendors, chipset suppliers, module vendors and systems integrators

NB-IoT is one of several technologies that u-blox is developing to drive innovation in IoT. We are also planning to launch LTE CAT 1 products during 2016 and LTE-M products in future. We see the technologies as complementary; enabling the industry to address a wide range of IoT application and use case requirements with different data rate, power consumption, coverage, mobility and transmit frequency needs.

IoT Now: What are the benefits of NB-IoT over unlicensed spectrum-based LPWA technologies?

SG: NB-IoT is deployed in the frequency bands allocated for LTE. The key advantage of using licensed spectrum as opposed to unlicensed for long range communications is quality of service in the broadest sense: availability, reliability, robustness, ease of use, billing, etc. Licensed frequencies come with a guarantee against interference and can be more easily monitored.

When using the ISM-bands, there is a constant risk that some other device or application may disrupt your service. In addition there are some fundamental aspects of scalability for unlicensed spectrum. At some point the ISM-bands will become highly congested if extensively used for IoT. The use of licensed spectrum facilitates

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international roaming and interoperability. NB-IoT will support international deployments right from the start in the same way as other mobile technologies. ISM-band technologies are on the other hand fragmented along geographic lines, with different frequencies allocated in Europe, North America and Asia.

IoT Now: What does the NB-IoT ecosystem look like?

SG: NB-IoT is a part of the wider cellular M2M/IoT ecosystem where key players include mobile operators, network infrastructure vendors, chipset suppliers, module vendors and systems integrators. The technology is widely supported by the leading players in the telecom industry.

The GSMA’s Mobile IoT Initiative is supported by around 30 of the world’s leading mobile operators, plus OEMs, chipset, module and infrastructure companies. A key part of the initiative is the establishment of the NB-IoT Forum that will focus on fostering a global ecosystem for NB-IoT technology. Several mobile operators are launching new NB-IoT Open Labs, which will focus on new service innovation, industry development, interoperability testing and product compliance certification. There will also be coordinated efforts to drive industry awareness of the new technology and engage with key verticals.

IoT Now: What are the proof of concept NB-IoT deployments in place today trying to validate?

SG: Pre-standard NB-IoT technology has already been successfully tested in field trials in different parts of the world. Last year, u-blox took part in a pilot conducted by Vodafone and Huawei in Valencia, Spain. Vodafone and Huawei integrated

▼

goods manufacturers are in the process of figuring out how to add connectivity to their products in the future. NB-IoT is a straightforward solution to this problem and doesn’t involve hooking up the appliance to the owner’s personal Wi-Fi network or smartphone.

NB-IoT essentially provides one hop to the internet avoiding any complex installation and deployment issues associated with gateways; essentially ‘switch on and go’.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

Today, u-blox provides products and evaluation kits for developers and system integrators to allow them to experience the technology, its performance and ease of use

the technology on the operatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s existing mobile network and successfully communicated with a u-blox wireless module in a water meter. A key focus for the pilot was to evaluate coverage and penetration aspects of NB-IoT, which proved to be very good relative to GSM. Another early pilot was conducted by Deutsche Telekom and Huawei in Bonn, Germany. u-blox NB-IoT technology has been an integral part of these and other trials taking place in other regions.

IoT Now: How can developers get access to NBIoT technology, and when?

communications and global positioning. Based in the UK, Simon has responsibility for developing and executing strategic partnering and market collaboration initiatives, with a particular focus on the rapidly growing Mobile IoT ecosystem. Key to this role is developing relationships with the mobile operator, systems integrator and IoT application enablement community. Simon joined u-blox in Sept 2015 from Numerex Corp, where he was VP, International Business Development.

Simon holds a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Cardiff University, and is a Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (MIET).

SG: Today, u-blox provides products and evaluation kits for developers and system integrators to allow them to experience the technology, its performance and ease of use. As soon as the final version of the NB-IoT standard is published we will be releasing further development kits and commercial products.

Based on the current timetable from the standardisation bodies, the NB-IoT standard should be ready in the first half of this year. We expect that we will release our first commercial NB-IoT products in the second half of 2016. Of course, NB-IoT modules would be of limited use without networks. Fortunately, the strong support from many of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest mobile operators makes us confident that there will be a rapid uptake of the technology worldwide. By 2017 we expect to see commercial NB-IoT networks across Europe and North America, as well as in China, South Korea, the Middle East and Latin America.

The exciting thing for developers is that NB-IoT opens up a huge range of applications where the total cost of ownership for the end customer, usually a company, is radically lower than using existing technology. Developers, systems integrators, and product companies can build new business around NB-IoT, secure in the knowledge that it has the whole of the cellular industry behind it and so avoids proprietary solutions with all the well-known limitations they bring.

Simon Glassman is head of Strategic Partnerships, EMEA at u-blox, a leader in semiconductor components for wireless

IoT Now - February / March 2016

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EXPERT OPINION

Narrowband IoT provides wider choices for IoT applications

NB-IoT is just one of a new range of LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) wireless technologies. IoT Now contributor George Malim assesses what the technology offers in contrast to its rivals With analyst firms including Analysys Mason, Machina Research and Strategy Analytics anticipating that there will be 2.7 billion LPWA connections by 2022, it’s clear that low power will have a wide range of applications. However, there are several options for organisations to consider in regard to which LPWA technology to select and whether to opt for licensed or unlicensed connections.

NB-IoT is a LPWA technology that offers low cost, long battery life, wide area coverage for objects that require a long range mobile connection and low power consumption. Many devices are not connected to mains power or are in hard to access areas that preclude regular battery replacement. NB-IoT promises to achieve up to ten years’ battery life and deep indoor penetration.

Cellular industry association, the GSMA, has recently established its Mobile IoT Initiative to put forward the case for licensed technologies, which its operator members offer. The initiative will focus on three proposed complementary licensed 3GPP standards: LTE Machine Type Communication (MTC), Extended Coverage GSM and Narrow band IoT (NB-IoT) technologies.

The improved penetration and low power requirements make it possible to connect devices using NB-IoT simply and efficiently using an established mobile network. The technology has applications for enterprises in a range of areas, from utility meters to sensor monitoring to asset-tracking.

“Where you have mostly 2G or 3G networks as we do in Europe with 4G coverage limited to cities and motorways, NB-IoT is going to be the most effective option,” he adds. “In fact, it’s going to be the only one you’re going to be able to use.

On the other hand if you’re Verizon or AT&T in the USA where 2G is switching off, you will go to for LTE MTC.”

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“Monitoring devices like water and gas meters often lie in basements, deeply shadowed areas and even underground pipes,” explains Luke Ibbetson, the director of research and development for Vodafone Group. “By installing connected flow meters around a water distribution network, for instance, a utility company could automatically detect leaks, meaning less time, cost and disruption digging up roads. It is not just hidden things that NB-IoT will connect. Smart bins, which efficiently report when they are full, have the same need for long battery life communications hardware.”

NB-IoT could result in operational cost savings for organisations. “Battery life and low install cost are also critical for local authorities across the world wanting to install more connected parking

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“NB-IoT is part of a wider range of LPWA technologies that the GSMA has been working to promote through our Mobile IoT Initiative,” explains Dr Shane Rooney, an executive director at the GSMA. “We’re supporting this family of technologies because it will be a case of horses for courses, depending on where you are and what technology you have available.”

IoT Now - February / March 2016

Dr Shane Rooney, GSMA

Luke Ibbetson, Vodafone Group

Andreas Thiel, u-blox

sensors,” adds Ibbetson. “Achieving this will reduce congestion and carbon emissions by informing drivers about the location of parking spaces.”

Rooney at the GSMA thinks NB-IoT could be more cost effective than rival licensed LPWA technologies. “At this stage, it’s difficult to compare NB-IoT and LTE-MTC devices but it is predicted that there will be a price difference and NB-IoT will have cheaper modules,” he says. “How much cheaper we don’t know – it might be $3 or $4 – but if you’re rolling out a smart metering project of one million meters a saving of $1 or $2 per module would be huge.”

NB-IoT, however, won’t be the cheapest option available. Unlicensed technologies such as LoRa and SIGFOX are also available but have their own limitations. NB-IoT will reuse existing Radio Access Network and transmission resources, while at the same time will deploy a separate dedicated and optimised core network.

you’ll need to change your infrastructure.”

Rooney also points to concerns about security of unlicensed spectrum. “In licensed mobile there’s a security standard and level that has existed for the past 20 years. You also have the flexibility to change operators if you want without having to change the proprietary infrastructure of an unlicensed operator.”

The technology is real and is becoming standardised with 3GPP Release 13.

Commercial trials are advancing as well.

Vodafone and vendors Huawei and u-blox have completed the first successful commercial trial of pre-standard NB-IoT. As part of the trial, Vodafone and Huawei successfully integrated NB-IoT onto the operator’s existing mobile network in Spain and then sent the first pre-standard NB-IoT message to a u-blox module in a water meter.

“Operating in licensed spectrum, NB-IoT will also ensure performance and reliability over the lifetime of these devices,” says Ibbetson.

“An attractive aspect for industries using NBIoT is that they can leave the connectivity provision to operators such as Vodafone rather than putting in their own proprietary solutions. Vodafone already has a global M2M network that will connect with our NB-IoT access layer.”

The trial used Huawei’s chipset and software and was the first of its kind to successfully implement narrowband communications in cellular bands. The deployment of NB-IoT in licensed cellular spectrum means it is secure and less susceptible to interference and can provide a better guarantee of service. “Along with our partners, we are driving innovation in NB-IoT technology to serve the industry as a whole, and are fully supportive of technology based on global standards,” says Andreas Thiel, executive director of cellular products at u-blox.

Rooney has quality and flexibility concerns regarding utilisation of unlicensed spectrum.

“If you use unlicensed spectrum there is no guarantee you are going to get connections all the time, so if quality of service is important to your organisation, I’d think twice about using unlicensed spectrum,” he says. “I also have concerns about flexibility in messaging. Some unlicensed services only allow four messages per day and limit messages to a certain load. That’s fine for basic applications, but if your needs change

Further trials and proof of concept deployments are planned by the companies to push forward the commercialisation of NBIoT and other companies are working on demonstrations and trials of their own.

Rooney thinks that ultimately take up of NBIoT and other LPWA technologies will come down to the requirements of the applications they support. “It’s definitely a case of horses for courses and of which country you’re in,” he emphasises. “The use case will determine which technology you use.”

IoT Now - February / March 2016

“If you use unlicensed spectrum there is no guarantee you are going to get connections all the time, so if quality of service is important to your organisation, I’d think twice about using unlicensed spectrum,” Luke Ibbetson, Vodafone Group

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INTERVIEW

Profiting from the IoT surge: the view from the front line of service innovation There’s no doubt that debate about the IoT and its direction has risen from being a specialist subject to near the top of the boardroom agenda for many companies in just a few years.

Amongst all the white noise, death-by-powerpoint presentations and sometimes desperate posturing by peripheral vendors to generate IoT-relevant marketing, it’s sometimes difficult to see the actual reality behind the virtual smoke and mirrors.

IoT Now: Philip, it’s just over a year since we last had an insight into what you were up to.

How was 2015 for you and Wireless Logic?

PC: There are as wide a set of answers to that question as there are facets of the IoT universe!

Taking a purely quantitative perspective first, in raw connectivity terms we’ve seen growth in the order of hundreds of percent in Europe alone and now support well over two million subscriptions

▼

Alun Lewis, IoT Now’s editor, recently sat down with Philip Cole, European sales director and cofounder of Wireless Logic, to look more closely at where all this growth was coming from – and where it was heading; how his company was moving even more deeply into the added services offering; and the optimum strategies that both IoT solution vendors and their customers should adopt to fully exploit the emerging IoT terrain.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH WIRELESS LOGIC 22

IoT Now - December / January 2015/16

Philip Cole, European sales director and co-founder, Wireless Logic

Taking a wider viewpoint, I’d also say that 2015 was the year that the IoT started to reach a critical mass in a number of different ways. Firstly, general awareness has started rising steeply.

Whereas a year or two ago you’d have got a vaguely blank look from the average man or woman in the street if you’d used the terms M2M or IoT, many people now have been exposed to at least some aspect of it via their Connected Cars, Smart Energy and Smart Homes – or are even just finding that some of their new devices have started ‘talking’ to each other without any human intervention. This recognition is now starting to affect consumer decision-making where white goods, cars, home security systems and other assets are concerned and that in turn is pulling even more manufacturers, service support companies and retailers into the IoT community.

The other corollary of growing awareness on both sides of the vendor/consumer mix is that many different types of company are now reexamining their business models and looking at how they can turn products into services – the so-called ‘servitisation’ strategy. It’s a strategy that we should be well aware of in the IT and comms sectors – essentially the parents of the IoT revolution – where locking users into repeat

IoT Now - February / March 2016

fees and creating and monetising longer term relationships has been a critical way of escaping the problems of rapid technology change, price erosion, and inevitable user churn. When you wrap an IoT-supported service around a product, you’re effectively using the IoT to create a new ‘instrument’, as it might be called in the financial sector, and in a growing number of sectors, traditional manufacturers who still rely on one-off product sales will find longer term business increasingly tough and revenue sources even more intermittent. Behind everything should lie the vision of connected customers as living human beings – not just connected devices and assets.

IoT Now: How are these shifts and changes actually translating into projects out in the field – and what demands are customers making as they seek to IoT-ise their businesses?

PC: Probably one critical issue that I touched on in an earlier answer is the sheer diversity of the projects and application areas that we’re involved with. In that context, many of the companies – and people - that we work with tend to come from a hardware/product background. That’s why our approach of offering flexible but structured service bundles to them, along with appropriate SLAs obviously, makes their entry into the IoT world much more straightforward and understandable for them.

One increasingly key aspect of this involves not just the diversity of the business sectors, but also the current expansion in connectivity options.

We’ve always been bearer agnostic, to use the technical term, and we find many clients needing a mix that often include both wireless or wireline options to ensure redundancy in mission or enterprise-critical applications such as electronic Point of Sale systems.

In terms of cellular technologies, it’s been interesting to see some of our customers starting to use 3G and particularly 4G access in some of their IoT applications where content delivery is part of their business – such as regularly updating digital advertising and signage in shops and malls. We’re also seeing this play out in the telematics and logistics sector as well with ▼

through our close partnerships with many network operators covering that continent.

Similarly scaled increases can also be seen in the sheer amounts of data that we’re hauling for customers - and that literally signals some interesting shifts in IoT and M2M application profiles that illustrate how content is also becoming part of the IoT service mix.

We also made what we think will be some strategically beneficial acquisitions, such as SIM Service in Denmark, while also simultaneously broadening and deepening our relationships with a range of system integrators, resellers and market-specific solution providers. On the last point, via those relationships, we now have access to a ‘virtual’ salesforce of around four and a half thousand people working for around 1500 solutions providers of all shapes and sizes across the continent, many of them deeply knowledgeable about particular territories, technologies and industry and business sectors.

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INTERVIEW

In terms of our wider network/IO environment, we could consider ourselves from a network infrastructure perspective in some ways to be the IoT equivalent of Blackberry

There’s also the family of technologies loosely known as Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) such as LoRa and SIGFOX and, from the cellular side, LTE-M and NB-IoT. Once again, we’re fully able to support these on our connectivity management platform – and the still important and relevant satellite option – as well. As I said, many of our customers don’t care about the underlying technology as such – they just want to be sure that wireless connectivity won’t limit their deployment of devices or trackable assets and that they’ve got the equivalent of five bars of signal strength, or another connectivity option instantly available to fall back upon should one go down for any reason.

In terms of our wider network/IO environment, we could consider ourselves from a network infrastructure perspective in some ways to be the IoT equivalent of Blackberry – and that has implications for the all-important issue of security. Your IoT traffic might be transiting public networks, but all the plumbing behind that is fully protected and encrypted, travelling over our VPNs and using fixed IP addresses invisible to outsiders in totally private and secure ways.

IoT Now: One recurring issue that has consistently cropped up during the whole evolution of the convergence sector - and increasingly connected businesses and consumers - is how you hide the incredible underlying complexity of all the systems involved and make them readily usable by nonexperts. What developments does Wireless Logic see emerging here?

PC: It’s just like many similar shifts that have already happened in other areas such as traditional retail – a move towards automation and true self-service – and that involves reducing the friction that’s often historically inherent in the many processes involved. To be successful, the IoT sector has to make a similar transition, moving from essentially craft-based, humanintensive interactions to single-push enablement for devices and services aimed at the consumer market.

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Wireless Logic is currently developing platforms that will enable both consumers - and those retailers who want to get close to them and create those long-term relationships that I touched on earlier – to have out-of-the-box IoT solutions. Obviously, that also involves far more than just implementing automated and streamlined service and device activation processes. Billing models, processes and systems in particular also need to be adapted and refined to cope with this new transaction terrain and that’s not always going to be easy as we move into totally new commercial areas.

Similar self-examination is also going to be essential in the area of relationship management – and I deliberately didn’t use the word customer there as value chains in this new world are going to be long, multi-faceted and be a complex mix of the usual acronyms: B2C2M2B and so on…

Any well-established company moving into new areas instantly makes itself a hostage to fortune and can risk long term investments in its brand – marketeers, for example, still talk about the Coca Cola’s disastrous attempt to introduce a ‘new’ version back in the 1980s. Many companies have tried to move out of their comfort zones and diversify, especially as new technologies eroded traditional boundaries, only to have to retrench later.

That’s why Wireless Logic is investing heavily in ensuring that the systems that underpin these new value chains are flexible, robust, user friendly – irrespective of who the user is – and secure.

From the vendor and operator perspective, those investments mean that the Wireless Logic SIMPro management platform is able to empower SIM estate owners to easily manage multiple SIMs across more than 30 networks with all the functions and processes that they need to incorporate IoT functionality into their services and products: provisioning, tariff management, grouping, real-time data usage, billing management and reporting.

Additionally, all these processes are becoming increasingly automated through our continued investment, cutting CAPEX, operational costs and de-skilling the need to have dedicated and expensive staff running the network and service operations.

Connectivity and device and service management can then become much more intimately integrated with all the other enterprise systems a company might already have, such as ERP. ▼

dashboard cameras increasingly being fitted to lorries and public transport. Those images or footage need to be captured and stored and can sometimes end up as invaluable evidence in court cases.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

This issue of boundaries between systems also reflects the issues that can arise when national borders are taken into account in developing solutions. We’re increasingly working with customers who have multi-country – and even multi-continent – requirements. By being able to deliver a single portal interface, supported by consistent pricing strategies and SLAs, companies have a stable operational environment through which to offer their goods and services.

IoT Now: That issue of integration surely though adds even more complexity? It’s one thing to introduce a new technology, but far more difficult to integrate it with a company’s existing processes, organisational structures and traditions. Many people – even engineers – are conservative by nature and resist even beneficial change.

PC: There’s always going to be a tension here – especially as the more disruptive models that many internet-based businesses rely on meet more established and status quo oriented cultures. Some IoT services and applications might be appropriate to fit into the permanent ‘beta test’ profile that some internet and social networking businesses rely on. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is famous for once having described, “Move fast and break things” as his company’s informal motto. It’s totally inappropriate to have such a culture in IoT areas where people’s lives, possessions, cars, energy supplies or even health might be at stake. Shortterm fixes and solutions can often translate into early burnouts and burnups as we’ve seen in a depressing number of cases.

That’s why we know Wireless Logic has to engage in a careful balancing act – which we seem to achieve successfully. Many MNOs essentially offer a ‘one size fits all’ model that fails to meet the needs of IoT users, even where basic factors such as 2/3/4G network availability and roaming are concerned. Alternatively, when IoT users try to stitch their own coverage together, entering into relationships with multiple MNOs, then they immediately run across all the hassles and overheads involved in managing SIMs across different networks. Coming to us, they’ll get a ‘network of networks’ approach that eliminates that complexity and expense. On top of that,

IoT Now - February / March 2016

they’ll also miss out on our much bespoke offering approach that involves engaging in a consultation period to explore and define exactly what the customer is trying to achieve, both strategically and tactically over short and long terms.

We’re fortunate in this context that our sales and support partners – the 1500 or so companies now spread across Europe that I mentioned earlier – can provide the insight and expertise that ensures that consultation and tailoring doesn’t slow innovation and service rollout. Someone wise once said that being a consultant didn’t mean that you had the answers – it just meant that you knew which were the right questions to ask...

If that’s how we’re dealing with the customer end, I should also add that we’re also developing very close links with the many different types of hardware, device and sensor providers now engaged in this market

If that’s how we’re dealing with the customer end, I should also add that we’re also developing very close links with the many different types of hardware, device and sensor providers now engaged in this market. As the intelligence and memory of devices and gateways continues to grow – and reduce in cost – we’re increasingly going to have a choice about where we process information and how much we choose to transmit and when.

IoT Now: So how’s all this translating into the bottom line for Wireless Logic ?

PC: It was just over a year ago that CVC Capital Partners took over as our main investors following a four-year partnership with ECI Partners. During our time with ECI, we’d opened offices in France, Germany and Spain, more than doubled our workforce and tripled our subscriber base to around 1.5 million. Looking to the year ahead, we confidently expect to continue this year on year growth rate of around 20%, bringing our revenues to nearly £50 million and driving up total European SIM subscriptions to about 2.5 million, with triple digit growth expected across Europe. We also have a major funding war chest in conjunction with CVC Capital Partners and that’s going to enable an active acquisition strategy which may drive significant additions to our portfolio. There might be many wild speculations about the potential size of the IoT market, but the figures above clearly show where Wireless Logic is heading.

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Machina Research GLOBAL ADVISORS ON M2M, THE INTERNET OF THINGS AND BIG DATA

Meet us at Mobile World Congress 22-25 February 2016 KEY MEMBERS OF THE MACHINA RESEARCH ANALYST TEAM WILL BE IN BARCELONA FOR THIS YEARâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS: Andy Castonguay Principal Analyst Focus areas: Americas, M2M/IoT devices & modules, wearables, healthcare

Jeremy Green Principal Analyst Focus areas: Automotive, M2M and IoT technology ecosystem, key IoT players

Emil Berthelsen Principal Analyst Focus areas: Enterprise IoT, big data, MEAPs, procurement, SLAs, QoS

Jim Morrish Founder & Chief Research Officer Focus areas: Enterprise IoT, software, M2M & IoT platforms

Godfrey Chua Principal Analyst Focus areas: Americas, carrier strategies, industrial, connected home and workplace

Matt Hatton Founder & Chief Executive Officer Focus areas: CSP M2M and IoT strategies, M2M technologies, regulation

Isabel Chapman Principal Analyst Focus areas: enterprise IoT, software and middleware platforms

To arrange a meeting, contact us at mwc@machinaresearch.com

ANALYST REPORT

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CONTENTS

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36 COMPANY PROFILES

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MOVING TO REAL WORLD IIoT DEPLOYMENTS

ANALYST REPORT 30

IoT NOW INSIGHT REPORT Jim Morrish, founder and chief research officer of Machina Research and co-chair of the Industrial Internet Consortium’s (IIC’s) Business Strategy & Solution Lifecycle Working Group (BSSL WG), examines in a two-part contribution the potential impact that the Industrial IoT will have on manufacturing and distribution and the potential barriers that might stand in the way of widespread adoption.

In the first section ‘How to get Industrial IoT projects off the ground’, he explores strategies to identify opportunities and the beneficial roles that an IoT Centre of Excellence can play in coordinating activity.

Consortium’s BSSL WG, which exists to help business managers, solution architects and operations managers to better handle the complexity that IIoT introduces and achieve their business goals more effectively and efficiently.

This article focusses on the more downstream considerations of IIoT Solution Lifecycles, and Libraries of project artefacts

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COMPANY PROFILES AT&T’s offerings in this market are explained

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EXPERT OPINION Mike Troiano, AT&T’s VP - IoT Solutions, gives his perspective on how companies can move towards real world deployment of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) and the potential this holds for creating new and repeatable types of service-based revenues

In the second, he draws on existing work done by him and his colleagues at the Industrial Internet

GOLD SPONSOR

ANALYST REPORT

Industrial IoT is about more than just the IoT The first thing to note about Industrial IoT is that it encompasses all of IoT and more. If we define ‘IoT’ as our connected future (including devices, services, new business models and new ways of interaction) then, behind every one of these propositions, we should expect to find an enterprise of some form. In short anything that is ‘IoT’ from an end-user perspective, is ‘Industrial IoT’ from the perspective of companies supporting that IoT proposition.

But, explains Jim Morrish, Chief Research officer at Machina Research, Industrial IoT (IIoT for short) is more than that in that it also includes consideration of product development and product lifecycle management, partner ecosystems and project management – all in an IoT context. In short, IIoT includes all aspects of the IoT, plus supporting infrastructures, and there are a number of specific ways in which IIoT is more complex than just IoT. These include: Jim Morrish is founder and chief research officer of Machina Research. He is also cochair of the Industrial Internet Consortium’s (IIC’s) Business Strategy & Solution Lifecycle Working Group, and is responsible for Business Strategy & Planning work within the IIC.

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• Fragmentation: The number and diversity of Industrial IoT applications are huge, and it is an incredibly fragmented environment. This means that the environment is typically characterised much more by bespoke services rather than products when compared to enduser environments. Systems integration will often play a dominant role in the development of IIoT solutions, drawing on productised tools (including IoT platforms) where applicable.

• ‘Brownfield’ deployments: The ‘everything connected’ roots of IoT thinking tend to prompt most people to imagine new connected devices and services associated with those devices when considering the IoT. However, there is a significant trend within enterprises to simply pull existing data into an ‘IoT like’ environment and experiment to see what can be done with the resulting datasets, including support for new processes and products. We term this ‘top down’ IoT, in contrast to ‘bottom-up’ IoT that is characterised by the deployment of new devices and associated services higher up the stack.

• Possible absence of devices: Whilst this also

applies to plain-old IoT solutions, it is worth highlighting that many IIoT solution deployments will not involve the deployment of new ‘things’. There are many instances in the IIoT context where simply pulling already existing data feeds from diverse sources and combining them can bring significant value to the enterprise.

• Machine Guys vs Internet Guys: Underpinning all of these dynamics is a more fundamental concept of the ‘DNA’ of any enterprise engaging in the IoT. Companies that have ‘Machine DNA’ are used to shipping devices and hoping that they never hear about their device again (since this would usually mean that something had gone wrong). Companies that have ‘Internet DNA’ are used to working in a world of continual-beta, where software and services are never actually ‘finished’. These two perspectives can create endless tensions throughout IIoT project cycles.

• The IT/ OT fight match: Traditionally, Operational Technology specialists and Information Technology specialists have not seen eye-to-eye. IIoT projects often force these two constituencies to cooperate to deliver business-critical solutions.

This publication includes a further two articles on IIoT topics. In the first (“How to get Industrial IoT projects off the ground”) we focus on all aspects of the development of IIoT propositions up to and including the business case, whilst in the second (“Managing IIoT Value Chain Transformation”) we focus on the more downstream aspects of developing and deploying IIoT solutions, post-business case approval.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

Figure 1: The Enterprise IoT Identification, selection and management process [Source: Machina Research, 2015]

How to get Industrial IoT projects off the ground While Industrial IoT (IIoT) projects are in many ways quite similar to more traditional systems integration projects, there are significant differences. In this article, we focus on those differences, including sections on: • IIoT strategy • IIoT opportunity identification • IIoT opportunity management • IIoT project initiation • IIoT Centre of Excellence • IIoT Platform

IIoT Strategy Before engaging in IIoT projects, an enterprise must set out their overall strategy with regards to the IoT, starting with defining a vision. Are their motivations for engaging in IIoT purely economic or (for example in the case of smart cities applications) could there be a broader motive of societal benefit also be a driver. What is the overall market and competitive environment in which the enterprise in question plans to engage? How is it likely to change in coming years?

When seeking to engage in IIoT, any enterprise will also need to define some kind of guiding framework for working with partners and the overall ecosystem. In parallel, the enterprise will also need to identify, at a high level, the capabilities that they are likely to need to engage in IIoT projects.

It is also beneficial to put in place frameworks and processes for tracking IIoT projects from conception through to live operations, including validation of results to check that individual IIoT projects have achieved what they set out to achieve. Significant time should also be invested in identifying and profiling a long list of risks - including operational, technology, execution, implementation and security risks - and identifying any pitfalls or lessons learned from previous projects, or from potential suppliers and ecosystem partners.

IIoT Opportunity Identification Industrial IoT applications can unlock many different kinds of benefits, including: • Creating new revenue streams • Reducing costs • Extending customer relationships

IoT Now - February / March 2016

• • • • • • • • • • • •

Improving product design and management Creating opportunities for new business models Improving decision making processes Supporting better product and service quality Improving asset management Enhancing environmental considerations Improving health and safety Developing new markets Supporting new strategic partnerships Enhancing operational performance Improving customer services Improving overall enterprise efficiency

Clearly, executives need to identify and prioritise the IoT applications they believe will best benefit their business.

Compared to other IT or machine-to-machine projects, the task of the executives is made that one degree more complex by having to decide in terms of roadmaps rather than single implementations. One of the more compelling and challenging attributes of IoT architectures is that once properly implemented, enterprise IoT environments can become a platform for growth. ‘Properly implemented’ means that architectural principles of scalability, agility, flexibility and modularity have been followed, and not compromised for the sake of singular goals. Identification of IoT opportunities can be achieved through such diverse management tools as brainstorming sessions, workshops, accessing industry analyst reports, engaging with consultants and receiving customer feedback.

The list of possible IIoT projects is almost endless. Which highlights a new problem: where to start? The real challenge for executives in IIoT is the prioritisation process, rather than the identification of opportunities.

Additionally, throughout the operational Plan-Build-Run stages, enterprises may discover new IoT opportunities or may need to discard or amend selected ones. Compared to the well-defined and detailed planned IT projects of the past, IoT methodologies work better with agile software development approaches – try, try and try, and if it fails, be ready to move on. And only invest as you go, and avoiding committing to multi-million dollar projects from the very beginning.

Figure 1, above, summarises the central process of IIoT opportunity identification, selection and prioritisation, and developing an IoT application roadmap with an optimised portfolio. Reassessments of existing opportunities and identification of new opportunities are critical elements in the process of continuous innovation.

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ANALYST REPORT

IIoT Opportunity Management

IIoT Centre of Excellence

The development of analytical underpinnings to support the analyses described above is key. There are two main aspects that must be considered, and we discuss each in turn: • Business model development • Impact and risk assessment

Whilst it’s not strictly part of getting an individual IIoT project off the ground, it will be beneficial for many enterprises to develop an in-house IIoT Centre of Excellence to get all IIoT activities off the ground. Such a center of excellence could encompass a range of activities, such as:

Clearly, as is almost always the case for significant projects, some kind of underpinning business case and business model will be required. The difference with IIoT projects is that historically most business case have been ‘isolated’ or standalone, rather than cast in the context of an overall enterprise strategy. In the case of an IIoT business case, it is necessary to consider how the business might perform in absence of the adoption of IoT concepts, and also to effectively ‘share’ the costs of the development of a generic IoT capability between any number of current and future IIoT projects. In many cases, the business cases that underpin IIoT projects are more analyses of existential questions, rather than simple analyses of costs and revenues. In concept, this might be similar to analyses undertaken by banks in the 1960s and 1970s deciding whether to adopt computer systems, or not.

As we know now, in retrospect, the question was never really ‘whether’ computerisation would be embraced, but ‘when’.

• IIoT Platforms: including the overall supporting technical infrastructure that exists within an enterprise to support IIoT projects. Main components should include an application platform, and a connectivity platform (or just a connectivity management capability). This does not necessarily imply a sizeable investment, and ‘low grade’ version of such a capability could almost be thought of as a centralised procurement function.

An accurate understanding of the impact of an IIoT project and a detailed analysis of risks is also required. With regard to analyses of impact, the key aspect is to understand the degrees of elasticity in a specification to match budgetary constraints.

The IoT is such a new environment, with so many unknowns, that IIoT project propositions must often be re-worked during the course of the Plan-Build-Run lifecycle. For instance, it may transpire that data sovereignty regulations limit the scope of potential solutions in ways that were not envisaged at the time that the initial business cases were developed, or certain planned QoS levels may not be achievable, due, for instance, to the limited availability of connectivity. It’s hard to imagine the full diversity of potential problems that might crop up to blow an IIoT project off course, and that’s the point: IIoT business cases need to be flexible enough to support analyses of how best to ‘compromise’ an optimal solution to match unforeseen technical constraints within available budgets. IIoT business cases must be sufficiently detailed and flexible to provide context when a business planner has to discuss project de-scoping with downstream project managers.

Effectively, this implies an ‘agile’ interface between IIoT business planners and IIoT project managers.

Clearly, it is also necessary to undertake a complete risk analysis for any new IIoT project, including with regards to security, and to support decisions regarding how much to invest in product security. ‘Gold standard’ security will not be an option for all IIoT projects.

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• Change management: IIoT projects often imply significant change to working practices that have been established over decades. In many cases, in many industries, the option to deploy change management specialists to drive the human changes that need to happen to match the technological (IIoT) changes will be a significant benefit.

• IIoT Consulting: On a slightly wider note, IIoT concepts are sufficiently new, and sufficiently different from ‘business as usual’ that it can often be beneficial to establish a wider consulting capability. This should be configured as an internal (shared) center of excellence staffed with people who live-and-breath IIoT concepts, and who can guide their peers who are embedded in the wider enterprise.

• IIoT Benchmarking: Clearly many of the members of the IIoT consulting group could beneficially spend part of their time analysing the wider industry in which their company participates. They should seek to identify best practices within the industry, and assess the overall maturity of IIoT concepts within the industry, with a view to painting a long term IIoT future scenario to act as a backdrop to further strategic planning.

Conclusions The IIoT - and, more widely, IoT concepts - will change the way in which business is done in coming years. The potential is almost limitless, and companies that fail to effectively capitalise on the opportunities that the IIoT presents run the risk of being outcompeted.

Industrial IoT projects themselves are quite similar in nature to current day systems integration projects, but there are significant differences which must be appreciated in order to gain the full benefits from IoT concepts, and to de-risk the process of IoT adoption.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

Figure 2: Agile IIoT Project Organisation Source: www.enterprise-iot.org

Managing IIoT Value Chain Transformation INTRODUCTION To address the Industrial IoT (IIoT) challenge, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has established the Business Strategy and Solution Lifecycle Working Group (BSSL WG), the goal of which is to support business managers, solution architects and operations managers to better manage the complexity IIoT introduces and to more effectively achieve their business goals.

Whilst the previous article “How to get Industrial IoT projects off the ground” focusses on the Business Strategy & Planning elements of Industrial and Enterprise IoT, this article focusses on the more downstream consideration of IIoT Solution Lifecycles, and Libraries of project artefacts.

IIOT SOLUTION LIFECYCLE On the solutions level, the entire lifecycle of the IIoT solution needs be supported – from planning and designing to building and testing, then preparing the operations environment, gathering data on the deployed solution or the product in use and ensuring the solution is performing as expected while able to evolve. Adding new services after the initial launch is important, and so is the support of existing and new customers. In this section we focus on three key aspects: • The role of IIoT system characteristics • Creating agile organizations for IIoT projects • Validation and improvements

The Role of IIoT System Characteristics IIoT system characteristics are about risk mitigation and managing trade-offs. How secure? How safe? How reliable?

How resilient? All these qualities have a price, in terms of budget, complexity and operational resource. Their benefits are not easy to quantify, yet getting them right is crucial to the long-term viability of the overall System.

Another way to look at system characteristics is their role in the value chain. What do all of these system characteristics (security, safety, reliability, etc.) have in common? They

IoT Now - February / March 2016

preserve the business value chain under adverse conditions, either by preventing bad events from happening (e.g., thwarting security threats) or by enabling the system to cope with a bad event when it occurs (e.g., designing an architecture with built-in redundancy for reliability.) Defining system characteristics is critical to the control and predictability of widely distributed systems spanning multiple providers and under fragmented governance, hence to the business value chain that relies on them.

System characteristics also add a non-functional layer of requirements, which are almost certain to conflict with functional system requirements. Required system characteristics may impact all aspects of an IIoT solution e.g., security involves processes and roles as much as a set of functions and an architecture choice - while also being determined by business requirements and acceptable level of risk. This is why system characteristics must be taken into account at design time.

The BSSL Framework under development within the IIC helps to manage the interdependencies between non-functional and functional requirements. It also helps evaluate various ways to achieve a particular non-functional objective, balanced with an acceptable level of risk. For example, the choice between securing a data flow with full encryption or with a faster and simpler integrity checksum will be influenced by very different factors such as how sensitive the data is, key management complexity, company policies and regulations, whether increased latency is an obstacle to future scalability, etc. The ability to handle these factors, the constraints that dictate them and their consequences are all crucial for IIoT solution architects.

Creating Agile Organizations for IIoT projects Another key challenge for IIoT project managers is to find the best project organization that will be able to deliver the desired solution functionality in an agile way, while simultaneously ensuring adherence to the architecture and design. BSSL WG has developed a best practice for the organizational set-up of an IIoT project, which includes the following teams: • Project Management, to ensure cohesion and adherence to project goals • Asset Preparation team, to ensure the integration of the IIoT solution with all aspects of the asset`s lifecycle.

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ANALYST REPORT

Figure 3: Validation and Improvements BSSL LIBRARIES

• Teams for key solution elements, including Backend Services, Communication Services and On-Asset components.

• Cross-Cutting Concerns team, addressing aspects such as Security, Asset Lifecycle Management (e.g., Asset Activation) and Solution Integration and Test.

• Solutions Infrastructure and Operations team, responsible for infrastructure set-up, operations preparation and application lifecycle management

BSSL LIBRARIES

Efficiently managing the interactions of these different teams is a challenging task. Figure 2 on the previous page outlines a structure that can support this task. At the top-level is project management. On this level, the central project backlog is managed. The key entities here are project epics (a high-level specification artifact from the agile toolbox), which are used to capture larger bodies of work. Furthermore, the overall system architecture is managed on this level. The individual IIoT solution teams are structured as described above. Here, the epics are broken down into more fine-grained user stories, which are managed in the individual team backlogs. For the on-asset components (e.g., gateways deployed on the asset), it may make sense to choose longer sprint cycles or project iterations, because hardware development is often not moving as fast as software development. However, sprint cycles should be aligned across the individual workstreams.

The BSSL design template library provides templates for IIoT project managers and solution architects to help them create project specification documents as well as higher-level entries for the project backlog (e.g., epics) - see Figure 4 on the next page.

Validation & Improvements The last part of the Business Solution Lifecycle Management is Validation & Improvements. Especially in a highly complex and dynamic environment like the IIoT, this part ensures ongoing solution optimization. The Validation & Improvements part consists of two pieces - see Figure 3 above: • Business Model Validation & Improvement: This part focuses on all aspects of monitoring the financial and strategic KPIs of the solution, measuring overall IIoT maturity, and implementing corrective actions, if need be.

• Solution Validation & Improvement: This part focuses on monitoring and improving the performance of the solution from the perspective of functionality, non-functional Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs), as well as other system characteristics like security, reliability and resilience.

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A key goal of the Industrial Internet Consortium’s BSSL WG is to create a library of reusable artifacts for IIoT project managers and architects. Two of these key artifacts are design templates and solution metrics.

Design Template Library

The different templates are grouped into five groups: • Cross-Cutting: Includes templates to document site surveys, project dimensions/taxonomies, project projections, milestone plans • Business Viewpoint: Includes templates for IIoT stakeholder analysis and problem statement • Usage Viewpoint: Includes templates like the “IIoT Solution Sketch” (a structured one-page overview of all key elements of an IIoT solution), as well as use cases or process landscapes for the solution • Functional Viewpoint: Includes templates like the datacentric “IIoT domain model”, as well as a template for “Asset Integration Architecture” and the IIRA Functional Domains • Implementation Viewpoints: Includes templates for software architecture, hardware architecture and integration architecture

Metrics Library Especially relevant for Validation and Improvement efforts, a set of standardized IIoT metrics will be very helpful. There are several dimensions that can be used to evaluate an IIoT system to include: • Functional dimensions: evaluating the functions of the system and their capacity under various perspectives: performance, throughput, data volumes, transfer time, connectivity and quantity of assets.

• Characteristic (or system characteristics) dimensions: assessing higher-level properties such as reliability, safety, resilience, scalability, security, privacy

IoT Now - February / March 2016

Figure 4: BSSL Template Library

The functional dimensions can be divided into specific areas such as assets, data and communication. In turn, each one of these areas may involve a cluster of indicators designed to produce a well-rounded profile of the system for this particular area.

Such metrics and indicators will be key to establishing contracts and responsibilities in largely distributed systems under fragmented ownership and governance. The evolution toward an IIoT value network - as opposed to linear value chains - means that a particular station or agent in the IIoT value network will have responsibilities to several others thus getting closer to operating in a service mode for various consuming parties. For example, asset tracking in a manufacturing plant will not just deliver tracking data to the production manager, but will become a service used by other business units or departments, such as shipping/receiving, equipment maintenance or even the quality assurance department.

It is clearly of importance that a common set of metrics be used across IIoT systems – or at least a common way to define metrics (including common templates, terminology and models). Customers and users will expect to find similar wellestablished definitions across SLAs. Experts and regulators will want stable and well-understood definitions of system characteristics such as security, privacy or safety. Tools vendors and system administrators will want to implement similar monitoring indicators and technologies across IIoT solutions.

metrics that make sense for a wide array of IIoT systems, what is a common representation for them, how to use them as system requirements, in SLAs, and how to implement their monitoring.

CONCLUSIONS AND OUTLOOK Outputs of the he Industrial Internet Consortium’s BSSL WG provide executives, IIoT managers, project managers and solution architects with many benefits, including: • CxOs and senior managers are provided with a set of useful tools which help them managing the IIoT value chain transformation.

• Project managers are provided with a set of structured best practices which help them reduce IIoT project risks and Time to Market.

• IIoT Solution Architects are provided with a set of technical references which help reduce technical risks and increase re-use and standardization which helps in reducing heterogeneity and complexity.

This article is based on an original article co-authored by Dirk Slama (Bosch Software Innovations), Jacques Durand (Fujitsu) and Jim Morrish (Machina Research). Dirk, Jacques and Jim are the co-chairs of the Industrial Internet Consortium’s Business Strategy & Solution Lifecycle Working Group.

It is the role of the IIC BSSL WG to help define (or select) methodologies about such metrics to include what are typical

IoT Now - February / March 2016

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COMPANY PROFILE

Company Summary AT&T helps people mobilise their worlds - with advanced mobile services, next-generation TV and high-speed Internet services, and smart solutions for businesses. For more than a century, it has consistently provided innovative, reliable, high-quality products and services.

AT&T has the best worldwide coverage of any U.S. carrier, with data roaming in more than 200 countries and territories. AT&T serves nearly all of the Fortune 1000, as well as neighborhood businesses all around the US. We offer solutions like highly secure mobile cloud and corporate network management that helps businesses in every industry serve their customers better.

Company Credentials AT&T connects cars, machines, wearable devices and more. It is working with top automakers and technology companies to make customers' lives easier - so they can use their car to order a pizza on the way home, and then use a connected watch later that night to track how many extra steps they'll need to take at the gym the next day.

AT&T is constantly innovating to find new connections in the Internet of Things. AT&T provides carrier-grade IoT Managed Services for storage and next generation Rapid Application Development for new IoT Solutions.

AT&T has spent the past several years pushing into the connected-car market, with deals with General Motors, Nissan, Audi, Tesla, BMW, Subaru, Ford Motor Co. and Volvo.

Elsewhere in the transport and telematics space, AT&T has connected over 1.9 million commercial vehicles, 900,000 usage-based insurance users, and 280,000 refrigerated containers. It is in the process of re-launching a unique global AirCargo Tracking solution.

Key Differentiators AT&T monitors virtually everything, everywhere. It enables asset monitoring solutions across all major verticals including Energy, Transportation and Logistics, Healthcare, Aviation, Automotive, Construction, and Retail. It has more than 25 million devices deployed across the key IoT markets, including meter reading, fleet, transportation, air cargo, healthcare, automotive, construction, digital signage and retail. Its Global SIM enables connectivity in 200+ countries and territories.

AT&T’s customisable and scalable solution stack is designed to meet the unique needs of an enterprise, so

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customers can quickly implement IoT solutions and get to the bottom line faster, with increased efficiency, productivity, and visibility. Capabilities include precertified devices, global connectivity with a single SIM, a single online management platform, application development tools, pre-packaged vertical solutions, and a professional services team to help every step of the way.

Also, the the company’s various IoT Foundries, support IoT rapid prototyping and innovation.

To make sure AT&T’s customer’s needs are met, it has developed strong partnerships across industrial companies, technology enablers, and IoT service providers. Customers benefit from the expertise and successes of the partner ecosystem working together to innovate the Internet of Things. AT&T is a founding member of the Industrial Internet Consortium and has partnered with top industrial manufacturers, service providers, and technology enablers to accelerate IoT development, including GE, IBM and Rockwell Automation.

Competitive Pressures In addition to its success in telematics, transport and automotive, AT&T’s Digital Life home-automation and security business, which is only two years old, was the No. 1 security company in terms of net subscriber additions in the US last year. Its emphasis and differentiation is completely different from other carriers who have stayed more in the traditional sense of focusing on adding smartphones instead of venturing into what is the next era. Specific to the transportation space, AT&T tries to differentiate itself by making it easier for Transportation companies to create their own solutions. It works together with customers on new IoT Managed Services. This means it is easier for customers to develop solutions on their own via the AT&T Flow Designer and store and access the data using the M2X Data Service.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

EXPERT OPINION

The Real Industrial Internet of Things Mike Troiano, AT&T’s vice president - IoT Solutions, gives his perspective on how companies can move towards real world deployment of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) and the potential this holds for creating new and repeatable types of servicebased revenue.

Connectivity is the common foundation for M2M and IoT solutions, but when it comes to the IIoT, deployments can be global, involving thousands or even tens of thousands of end points. It’s also an integral component of an IIoT platform.

Integral was italicised because AT&T has developed M2X, a cloud-based, secure data storage service that was designed to extract data from millions of end points regardless of the communications technology, i.e. it’s device agnostic. This means that two components of the IIoT framework, communications and the cloud are functionally integrated.

integration of connectivity, the cloud and application development.

Data can be managed at a granular level using the M2X Developer Portal. That makes it easy for devices, apps and services to analyse the data that has been generated from the various data sources and, for example, define rules that create notifications which in turn initiate actions.

Deployments

M2X was built by developers for developers. It eliminates the need to think about different network protocols when creating applications. It also allows data from legacy devices that may have been operating around the world for several years to be incorporated into a new solution.

So far so good, but it gets better.

M2X was released last year in beta and several companies have begun integrating and using the service. Rockwell Automation and AT&T are collaborating to deliver cellular solutions that help Rockwell’s customers collect, manage and take action on data from industrial equipment located in plants and remote sites around the globe. The Ericsson Service Innovation Framework is now integrated with the M2X Data Service and Numerex is developing oil and gas solutions to optimise oil and chemical distribution.

Flow Designer

Trends in the market

Flow Designer, which was developed at AT&T’s Foundry innovation centre, uses drag-and-drop icons that are employed to create associations between objects and to invoke various types of actions. In a nutshell, the application is represented by a flow chart and the code that performs the various actions is embedded in the icon. It’s basically a robust Web-based development environment where data driven applications can be designed and deployed and M2X is employed in the same environment.

Therefore AT&T has enabled the functional

One obvious trend involves the transition from selling products to selling services based around a particular product. One customer, for example, is allowing truck fleet managers to pay for tyres on a miles-driven basis. Usage-based models allow companies to lower their capital spending: in this case tyres become an operational expense and they provide vendors with recurring income streams.

Mike Troiano, VP, IoT Solutions, AT&T

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A future connected car could be recognised at gas pumps which know how many litres or

IN ASSOCIATION WITH AT&T IoT Now - February / March 2016

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EXPERT OPINION

gallons went into the tank and, at the end of the month, the driver would be sent a bill from the retailer. This may sound like an unlikely development, but who knows what will happen in future. However, it does illustrate the fact that the IIoT offers companies radically new ways to think about their products as well as the opportunities that new digital products and services could generate.

A related trend, which comes from the service model, is the on-going relationship with customers that it enables. When a product is sold there is a single point of contact: in the usage-based model contact is continuous and that enables vendors to upsell new services and additional functionality, which can be embedded in the product.

The use of Big Data analytics is another obvious trend. Companies can now employ the services of data scientists to analyse huge volumes of data that are beyond the scope of conventional analytics and business intelligence solutions.

The market response to this development has been very positive and although not widely reported as such, it is rapidly becoming a key driving force behind the creation and deployment of IoT solutions. You can see it as the big prize that IoT and big data delivers. The implication is that data analytics may end up wagging the IoT dog.

Technology hasn’t changed the market’s key objectives.

Companies still want to deliver high-quality products

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IoT architectures can supply both the raw material as well as sophisticated real-time and historical analytics that shape and guide those intelligent business decisions.

foundation that is in place and has been for several years.

Unfortunately there is no commonly accepted, precise definition of the IoT: the term has become entangled with that of M2M. My somewhat wordy take, written earlier this year, is that “IoT solutions can accommodate diverse distributed unattended devices that are geographically dispersed and connect the different data types coming from various intelligent assets in the field.

In addition the architecture of IoT solutions is intrinsically flexible: assets can be amended and new assets can be incorporated at any time.

Solutions are therefore future proofed and able to adapt to changing economic and business requirements.”

Distill it down and it isn’t a million miles away from AT&T’s offer, and one would therefore expect the industrial sector to be enthusiastic about the IIoT, but research stats are somewhat disappointing. The adoption of the technology is still in the early adopter phase, moreover an LNS Research report indicates that 47% of the market does not plan on investing in IoT in the future and 44% does not understand or know about IoT. The two figures are obviously closely linked.

Crossing the chasm Those percentages match the traditional technology adoption model. There is a chasm between the enthusiastic early adopters and the mainstream - the 47% in the research report. To say that enterprises need to be educated is somewhat patronising, but they do need to be better informed and one way to do that is to cut through the hype and deliver clear, concise messages.

Take up Hype and confusion continue to obscure the importance of the IoT to the business community.

M2M solutions have the proven ability to deliver tangible benefits to individuals, businesses and society. The IIoT delivers more: it can boost operational efficiency, enhance customer service, open up new business opportunities and increase agility. Moreover, it’s based on a robust

Technology hasn’t changed the market’s key objectives. Companies still want to deliver highquality products; deliver them on time; be able to increase production when needed; and get new products into the market a.s.a.p. The visionary early adopters are showing what can be done: the mainstream conservatives will either follow or they will fall by the wayside and leave the game.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

INTERVIEW

The Eurotech Ethos: data - the strategic element for an ecosystembased, service-rich Internet of Things Awareness of the transformational power of the IoT vision is spreading among the traditional M2M community, with new players entering the IoT space, organisations of all types adopting or planning to adopt an IoT strategy, and policy-makers and regulators increasingly recognising its potential social and economic impact. This momentum doesn’t just involve innovation in technological terms, but also new business models.

Saverio Romeo (SR): What is and what will be the Internet of Things?

Roberto Siagri (RS): Defining the IoT is a complicated and risky task. In our daily experience, the IoT reveals both its complexity and its enormous potential. Through our offerings, we are reducing that complexity and moving towards easy-to-implement solutions.

However, data is the strategic element of the IoT. That data, which is the result of a combination of different sources and typologies, is the building block that enables the creation of new services on devices or set of devices. The IoT vision is a service-based one enabled by the flow of data produced - and the power of that vision can be enhanced if the flows of data are open to all parties to use in creative and original ways.

SR: How far are we from the IoT vision you envisage?

RS: This is a very dynamic space and the pace of innovation is tremendous in technological terms.

The desire to test and deploy new business models spans many industry sectors - but I also think there are several challenges that we have to face. Above all, we believe that there are misunderstandings about how to prioritise IoT initiatives. Many organisations adopting or hoping to adopt the IoT see it as an application-centric solution. Therefore, they focus their IoT strategy around the application. This is really an increasingly out of date M2M view. Instead, the focus should be around the data – and that’s data as an enabler of applications. However, it has to

be said that the landscape is confusing for the many who don’t already have experience with the IoT. The confusion that infests IoT platforms is an example of that. The term ‘IoT platform’ is used to label solutions that are all actually very different from one other. The result is an uncountable number of platforms, and that confuses adopters.

Resolving that sort of conceptual and semantic fog is one key challenge for the IoT community.

SR: Robert, what are your thoughts about the current status of the IoT industry?

Defining the IoT is a complicated and risky task. In our daily experience, the IoT reveals both its complexity and its enormous potential

Robert Andres (RA): I fully endorse Roberto’s comments on what the IoT should be. The challenges in front of us are: complex technology, lack of specific skill sets, IoT/IT integration challenges, security, regulatory issues, certification, confusing messages from industry and standardisation bodies, interoperability of solutions - and we could add even more issues if we had time. However, we also have a tremendous industry that’s strongly motivated to confront these. There are major industry trends underway that will lead to effective and affordable IoT solutions and the general commoditisation of distributed systems.

Compared to the past, we now have powerful embedded systems - not just general purpose gateways – and, additionally, purpose-built systems for vertical market applications. We also have sophisticated enterprise IT technology, including virtualisation and security and cloud computing solutions, that can now be exploited in OT (Operational Technology) infrastructures.

SR: What’s Eurotech’s role now in today’s IoT market?

RA: Eurotech has been delivering distributed device solutions involving both hardware and software for more than two decades now. This invaluable experience also has been made available via software products to both our customers and our system integration partners.

These products leverage and support open industry standards and were built to specifically address the IoT/IT issues many companies experience.

RS: If we try to condense the Eurotech offering and strategy into a simple goal, it would be to

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Senior analyst at Beecham Research, Saverio Romeo, recently met with a long term player in the M2M/IoT space - Eurotech. This Italian headquartered company has been behind some important innovations - such as the MQTT standard - and has successfully transitioned from an application-centric approach (M2M) to a ‘space-centric’ approach (IoT) in which spaces are sensed, connected, and intelligent, with the IoT becoming based on a service-centric view rather than a device-centric one, with data as the key enabler. Roberto Siagri, CEO at Eurotech, and Robert Andres, CMO at Eurotech, strongly believe that data openness is the real engine that will drive the full potential of the IoT vision.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH EUROTECH IoT Now - February / March 2016

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INTERVIEW

reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in IoT/M2M solutions. It’s about delivering a dramatic cut in initial investment, reduce risk, and shorten time to market.

SR: Can you provide an overview of Eurotech’s key offerings?

RA: The actual software on the device is an important building block in our strategy. In order to simplify and optimise the development of device software, Eurotech offers an application framework layered on top of the operating system called the Everyware Software Framework or ESF. It is based on Linux, Java and OSGi and enables the implementation of business logic rules in a very effective way.

Not only does it abstract the hardware in order to ensure investment protection with regards to the software, but it also allows new services to be dynamically loaded onto IoT multiservice gateways or edge nodes at run-time.

Another very important building block is our cloud-based IoT platform called the Everyware Cloud that integrates easily into existing enterprise IT infrastructures – offering simple access through standard APIs to both real-time and historical data from devices. In addition, this IoT integration platform also offers the device life-cycle features that ensure smooth deployment and management of the distributed device infrastructure.

There are other important elements, depending on the nature of the customer business. One particular aspect I would like to highlight is carrier certification, required in many markets for devices connected to the cellular networks. For many companies that wish to sell their products or services internationally, these certifications are a major barrier because of the associated effort and cost. Our ReliaCELL product range is a very attractive, pre-certified modular solution.

SR: Security is a crucial topic for the IoT. What does Eurotech offer in this field?

important, we also believe that proper authentication methods, management of certificates, and especially an overall architecture and design approach that eliminates many possible attack scenarios, are also important. Furthermore it is essential to validate and audit the security measures regularly by external security specialists.

Eurotech is able to offer security solutions that cover the span from IoT gateways and edge devices to the IoT applications enablement platform itself. Examples are an end-to-end security offering based on x.509 Certificate and PKI technology, or an architecture that ensures that the ‘attack surfaces’ of IoT devices are significantly reduced.

SR: The IoT brings complexity into organisations. We have discussed security as an element of that complexity, but integration between the IoT and existing IT systems, or the IoT/IT integration, is also increasingly becoming important for companies. What’s Eurotech approach on that?

AR: In IoT business opportunities, the IT department is playing an increasingly important role. That results in different technology and architecture decisions to allow an effective IoT/IT integration. That in turn requires more changes on the OT side - but also IT realising that new technology approaches are required. Interfaces and solutions, including the programming of edge devices, have to be done in an ITcentric way - such as using Java instead of C++ - in order to scale. With our ESF environment, we provide several advantages to the IoT/IT integration space, such as: powerful embedded systems, open and industry standards, no HR constraints (Java programmers instead of senior C++ specialists, for example), multi-service software-defined systems, and real-time data communications.

SR: Roberto, is any single organisation able to fully deliver an end-to-end IoT solution for every context?

Security in IoT projects is more than just the combination of some ‘perimeter defence’ systems. While these elements are

RS: I believe that no-one is currently able - or will be able - to offer an end-to-end solution for everyone. The complexity involved in deploying IoT solutions requires a partnership approach and it’s therefore essential to create an ecosystem of trusted players adaptable to different projects. It’s also important to make that ecosystem open to new influences and contribution. This is for example our approach with Eclipse Kura, an OSGi-based application framework for M2M/IoT service gateways where Eurotech is contributing significantly in open source. In the Kura initiative, you can clearly see the underlying ethos behind Eurotech: data is the strategic element, while a wide ecosystem of players can act as the strategic workers to develop and implement the truly service-centric IoT that we all anticipate.

Roberto Siagri is the co-founder, President and CEO of Eurotech S.p.A.. Roberto holds a degree in Physics from the University of Trieste. In addition to his commitments within Eurotech, he is a member of the Italy-Japan Business Group as well as of the Innovation Board of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. He is also Vice Chairman of DITEDI, the DIgital TEchnologies DIstrict of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, and member of the Technical-Scientific Committee of Friuli Future Forum

Robert Andres has worked in the IT and Communications industry for over two decades.

He spent much of his career as an Executive Board member in several high-tech companies focussed on embedded, networking, IT security and IoT. Robert‘s responsibilities have included, but are not limited to marketing, business strategies, sales strategies and business development in roles such as CTO. Since 2010, Robert has worked as CMO for the Eurotech Group, concentrating on IoT.

AR: Eurotech understood very early on that security has to be approached holistically and, in an IoT infrastructure, leverage best practice approaches and technologies from the existing IT security space. In order to safely address all possible points of failure, security must be a fundamental part of the overall architecture of an IoT system. IoT system architects must account for the specific challenges of distributed and unattended mobile devices and implement security both endto-end and in each individual element.

Roberto Siagri, co-founder, president and CEO, Eurotech

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Robert Andres, CMO, Eurotech

IoT Now - February / March 2016

INTERVIEW

Patrick Kuo, CEO, ThroughTek Co., Ltd. Patrick co-founded ThroughTek in 2008 with his belief in the future of globally connected device systems. His passion and ideals are key elements in the evolution of Kalay Platform, which currently sources one of the largest IoT ecosystems with more than 130 million total connections per month.

Patrick was at the helm for a number of tech startups before ThroughTek and has proven to be an exceptional entrepreneur. Under his leadership, ThroughTek has scaled its IoT ecosystems business while maintaining a strong startup culture with innovation as the driving force.

Driving innovation for surveillance and smart home market – and other key IoT developments Matt Hatton, founder and CEO of Machina Research talks to Patrick Kuo, CEO of Throughtek

PK: ThroughTek is a software company, providing turnkey IoT solution and cloud services with the Kalay Platform. Our extensive partnership with chipset vendors enables businesses to easily implement and rapidly deploy IoT ecosystems.

We work mostly with enterprises, such as technology brands, device manufacturers, system integrators, and service providers to deliver managed services for multimedia and smart

home application with integrated products.

MH: ThroughTek’s main product is Kalay which is an agent that simplifies connecting diverse devices. Can you explain to me a little about how it works?

PK: The challenges with building an IoT ecosystem is in integrating disparate elements.

Specifically, I mean dealing with multiple protocols, brands, and data sources when attempting to control different devices. The Kalay Platform uniquely identifies devices to address ▼

MH: For readers who aren’t very familiar with ThroughTek, can you introduce us to your company?

ThroughTek is a software company, providing turnkey IoT solution and cloud services with the Kalay Platform

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THROUGHTEK IoT Now - February / March 2016

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INTERVIEW

discovery service within one platform, allowing device-to-device communication and the exchange of information. For enterprises that lack the experience and required resources, ThroughTek seamlessly integrates devices to one platform, significantly reducing both development time and time to market.

MH: You debuted your Cloud Platform at MWC last year. How has the last year gone for it?

PK: It certainly has been a very productive year for us. Our Kalay Platform has grown to support a variety of devices, now with more than 180 SoCs (System on a Chip) integrations supported.

Security continues to lead in smart home applications, so delivery of multimedia content plays a large part in surveillance. We spent the last year enhancing the performance of our connection technology and streaming server, which largely differentiates us from other IoT platform services. Our streaming server now supports real-time two-way communication for the transmission of audio and images simultaneously. The Kalay Cloud offers video recording features, which are designed to work with new cloud storage options to enable video playback. Security cameras can be combined to work with sensors to automate the recording of anomalous events and send notification alerts as a complete solution for smart home security.

ThroughTek is also further developing the data collection and analytical framework of the Kalay Platform to define standards for data processing and machine learning. Through adaptive learning, we are able to capture and analyse data in realtime based on historical data to create values for predicting anomalous events or behaviours. Our goal is to provide an end-to-end solution to help enterprises connect devices and then manage and make the most out of their data through business intelligence.

MH: What are ThroughTekâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s other areas of focus?

PK: A vast majority of companies will be using IoT in some way within the next few years, so it is up to cloud service providers to help enterprises create value from the connectivity opportunity.

Previously, we focused on helping companies build connections for security cameras and home devices to enable to remote device management.

We are currently improving our service offerings and expanding our partnerships to integrate third-party services to enrich applications for the delivery of IoT security, live broadcast and video analytics.

Furthermore, we are taking the next steps to convert traditional products into novel services for companies entering the IoT market.

ThroughTek has been working with device makers to extend their application use. We have started to see an increase in demand for smart home devices that relate back to home security.

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Many doorphones are now wireless and require remote access to allow end users to communicate, monitor and control door entry.

While lighting as an example works well when combined with motion sensors to improve levels of comfort for the home, it also adds a certain level of security when combined with wireless cameras. Robotics and telecare devices are another area we expect to make an impact in the near-future, used for the elderly and for child care to provide improved communication and interaction between end points.

MH: Until now, ThroughTek has focused a lot of attention on the surveillance segment. Which sectors do you think are particularly ripe for growth in 2016?

PK: Absolutely, the security and surveillance market was our main focus last year, but it will continue to grow across the globe, particularly as new applications create different types of demand. We are seeing the smart home market slowly mature, as telecoms and service providers are waking up and beginning to integrate security systems as part of their overall services. This has given us the opportunity to work on delivering increased manageability to devices and sensors for energy saving, security, and comfort for a more comprehensive smart home solution. End users can assign device groups, control lighting, room temperature, and more from their smart phones, wherever they happen to be.

For retail and the public sector, surveillance footage can be analysed with visualisations to extract information about people count, traffic behaviour and demographic breakdown. In the DIY and smart home market, there is a need for device integration of cameras with sensors for the automated detection of anomalous behaviour to issue alerts to users. This means allowing access to information and apps across all kinds of devices, from phones, camera devices, lighting, door phones, to smart TVs and sensors in homes and even for dashcams used in the car. With content providers, they are more interested in services that break down information about viewership, content type and viewer behaviour.

MH: The connected home is particularly your area of expertise. It has been relatively immature until now. What have been some of the challenges? In the next year or two, what will be the next big themes in IoT? PK: The challenges we face are in unifying a variety of standalone products with different connectivity standards onto one platform and in enabling different application needs for each brand. As more companies start to adopt and implement IoT, we will start to see that interoperability is expected as a basic connectedproduct feature. The process alone will require time and effort for businesses across different verticals to work together to define product standards and services that will make a real impact on economy and society. â&#x2013;ź

Security continues to lead in smart home applications, so delivery of multimedia content plays a large part in surveillance

IoT Now - February / March 2016

The demand for connected-home devices hasn’t reached its full potential yet. People are demanding and willing to pay for smart security, but less so in other forms of smart devices. This may be because consumers have not found reasons to buy beyond being able to remotely control wireless devices. IoT companies are working hard to make sense of data to create value added services bundled with products to deliver automated intelligence in the background.

Companies will need to organise, prioritise and streamline data, to effectively collect and gather it, so that it provides helpful and relevant information to create smart solutions that resonate with customers. Through data generated from connected devices, we want to provide insights and present it properly to improve on user experiences and provide opportunities for enterprises to turn IoT into monetisable models.

Such services will increase the motivation to purchase connected product offerings via recommendations on operational efficiencies that can be gained and energy savings. ThroughTek as an example has begun shifting its focus from enabling connected components to developing machine learning models and analytics to help enterprises manage and monetise IoT. Another issue that needs to be addressed is the ‘security of things’. Lack of security guarantees and the consumer’s fear of personal information being stolen through the use of connected devices could hinder growth. At ThroughTek, we continue to help enterprises deliver connected devices and services while including security features to ensure users’ privacy is protected.

This can be done through authentication, access enforcement and encryption on devices to ensure that communication between home devices, the cloud and apps are protected.

MH: As we move into 2016, what significant changes do you see in the market?

PK: One of the hints at continual growth in IoT is that we are seeing an increase of interest in companies and investors among emerging markets - South East Asia, the Middle East and India. While these markets lack networking infrastructure, they are actually at a huge advantage as they are less tied down by the generations of infrastructure developments that larger cities have inherited. It may be difficult to tell how quickly IoT will spread across the globe: however, internet penetration will be a key indicator, along with interest among investors, as they tend to indicate government and industry commitments to implement network systems for broadband connectivity.

From a consumer-end perspective, the idea of selling standalone products will slowly become obsolete, which will transform business models to create new streams of revenue opportunities. We see this happening as traditional cable and telecom companies are expanding their offerings to include home security and automation systems. Ten years

IoT Now - February / March 2016

ago, customers could walk into a telecom service store to purchase a standalone device. Today, consumers arrive at telecom service stores and expect to purchase devices bundled with network and other service offerings. The product-centric experience of the past was defined by the hardware and the operating system. Nowadays, IoT has defined new ways via applications for a truly customer-centric experience.

MH: This interview is being conducted for the edition of IoT Now that coincides with Mobile World Congress. What are your expectations for the show?

PK: The smart home segment will still be a major theme at the show this year. As 2015 was the first time wearable devices had a major presence, we expect to see a variety of devices in 2016 again, but integrated with more complete solutions for smart home and connected car applications that service providers will be able to offer to the mass market.

Another issue that needs to be addressed is the ‘security of things’.

Lack of security guarantees and the consumer’s fear of personal information being stolen through the use of connected devices could hinder growth

Wireless connectivity is another a crucial step in the advancement of IoT. From a user perspective, 5G should enable faster, smarter services and higher data rates with lower transmission delays.

This means an improved content viewing experience for users, as they will be able to download high-definition multimedia content within seconds. There will be more discussions about 5G standards and network infrastructure solutions, as well as standards for devices and wireless communications.

MH: Can you share some thoughts on what the mobile industry is doing to support IoT, in particular as it affects the areas on which ThroughTek focuses?

PK: As consumers begin to buy-in with IoT, we will start to see device manufacturers realise the need to work closer with software companies.

Semiconductor companies will be required to provide comprehensive solutions — for instance, those that involve security, software, or systems integration services in addition to hardware.

ThroughTek being an example, we have always and will continue to work closely with our chipset partners to ensure that embedded chips within devices will be able to support software applications and increase product innovation.

With the Internet of Things, real-time communications is key in real world networking environments. IoT growth will require comparably significant infrastructure development. Telecoms and service providers will need to improve network infrastructures in order to manage largescale data transportation, as more devices and sensors will be processing and handling data. The ability to operate efficiently and scale management of network infrastructure will be required to achieve the promise of the Internet of Things. Telecoms and service providers will also need to evaluate whether their pricing models will be competitive enough to scale and meet consumer needs.

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Join us for the 3rd Annual MWC Wrap Party Drinks and hot canapĂŠs 19.30 till late Wednesday 24th February 2016 Marmalade Restaurant Bar Cocktails Riera Alta 4-6, 08001 Barcelona RSVP TODAY: mark@vanillaplus.com to guarantee entrance!

FREE Prize Draw to win one of 3 Fitbit ChargeHRs Photo: Courtesy of Fitbit Inc

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 • VOLUME 6 • ISSUE 1

THE CEO GUIDE TO MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2016, BARCELONA

SAP – accelerating adoption of the IoT vision Tanja Rueckert, executive VP at SAP, talks IoT and customer innovation

LATEST NEWS & VIDEOS AT

www.iot-now.com

PLUS: A five page roundup of what’s going to be on the C-level radar this year in Barcelona

INTERVIEW

SAP – accelerating adoption of the IoT vision Business software giant SAP is moving fast to help its customers tackle the challenges they face in addressing the Internet of Things. But what is the modus operandi of SAP and how does it see the IoT market developing?

IoT market drivers, adoption models, big data management issues, industry alliances and standards and of course security are all issues at the fore when it comes to considering IoT company projects.

Timing First of all, IoT Now asked about timing and questioned Rueckert whether she thought the IoT was already here and whether companies had to jump in now to take full advantage of the promised opportunities.

Rueckert says: “I truly believe IoT is here and now and it's not hype. The technology trends clearly support this, as computing power and machine learning capabilities increased, while cost for IoT sensors and storage decreased. The “things” in the networks get more intelligent, as they create data that can be turned into smart data using the analytics systems already available on the market.”

“I truly believe IoT is here and now and it's not hype. The technology trends clearly support this, as computing power and machine learning capabilities increased, while cost for IoT sensors and storage decreased”

She adds: “There is a clear pattern showing the IoT is here today and those that act now will lead in the future.”

That said though, when one thinks of the cloud and how long it took for widespread commercial take up of software-as-a-service, platform-as-aservice and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves with the IoT? Rueckert disagrees. “The growth and take up of the IoT will accelerate much faster than the cloud. It may not be for everyone in a year's time, but in two or three years there will be widespread take-up at a far wider level than was seen with the cloud.”

Rueckert says the IoT is a far different animal than the cloud at this stage of its development as it is already rapidly growing to support mission critical

applications in the logistics, manufacturing, energy and utility sectors. With the cloud, companies first started to put their email, sales leads, HR and expenses systems into the public cloud, not mission critical systems or important business applications such as ERP. The IoT is already central to major smart meter roll-outs in the utility sector – such as the £11 billion UK nationwide roll-out, which is being paid for by the government – and global manufacturing and energy firms are already in the process of linking their international operations and facilities using IoT networks.

She says: “With the IoT, companies have far less time, but at SAP we believe there are different value steps. Organisations may want to take little steps first then move faster after their initial testing, but they really have to start now.”

The energy sector is an important case in point.

SAP Business Trends recently featured Peter Reynolds, a contributing analyst with the ARC Advisory Group. In relation to the falling global oil price, he says: “When you are making money and shareholders are happy, there is little case for change. But when prices are this low, it’s time to look at doing things differently.”

Reynolds says finding ways to lower operational costs is now key to survival for many oil and gas companies, and that embracing the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) is essential. After all, the industry is built on thousands of miles of pipe and millions of pumps, valves and gauges.

“There is an awful lot of legacy infrastructure out there,” Reynolds told SAP Business Trends (http://scn.sap.com/community/businesstrends/blog/2016/01/25/low-oil-prices-prime-oiland-gas-industry-for-iot-adoption), “but that doesn’t mean you have to rely on legacy thinking.” He says the IoT is really about rethinking work processes and transforming the operational experience.

Sensor-enabled infrastructure and wireless connectivity offer oil and gas companies alternatives to costly field operations. “Why monitor 50 pumps when you can monitor 50,000 pumps?” Reynolds asks. ▼

In an interview with Tanja Rueckert, SAP executive VP for the Internet of Things and Customer Innovation, IoT Now contributor Antony Savvas asked how the company is addressing the key areas that enterprises need to know about the IoT and how SAP is supporting the growing market.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH SAP 46

IoT Now - February / March 2016

Tanja Rueckert – executive VP, IoT & Customer Innovation Tanja leads the IoT & Customer Innovation unit which, working in close collaboration with customers and partners, focuses on developing innovative software solutions particularly in the area of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0.

Co-innovating with customers and partners to accelerate their digital transformation by bringing individualised, but scalable, business solutions to market is at the core of Tanja’s organisational charter. Expanding the market reach of SAP’s innovation pipeline through globalisation services complements her responsibilities.

Tanja joined SAP in 1997 and has held multiple leadership roles in quality and program management and was the COO of HR and Products & Innovation board areas. She holds a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Wuerzburg and the University of Regensburg. Tanja splits her time between Silicon Valley and SAP’s headquarters in Walldorf, Germany, and is a mother of two children.

Remote monitoring from a centralised location allows companies to achieve economies of scale, while still enabling them to make critical performance decisions based on massive amounts of data, he says.

Other areas that wider IoT use is expected in soon, says Rueckert, are manufacturing, mineral mining, healthcare, transportation and smart cities and retail. On the latter, she says: “You are looking at the 'perfect store' scenario, with things like intelligent shelves and also efficient energy control.

“I was talking to someone in retail recently and they told me that if something could be delivered to cut their energy costs using IoT they would be quickly on board, you wouldn't believe what energy costs amount to on a retail business's profit and loss sheet.”

The human effect At the recently held World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, delegates heard that up to 7.1 million jobs will disappear in 15 major economies – including the US, UK, Germany, France and Italy - over the next five years during a “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. This would be as a result of “disruptive technologies” around artificial intelligence, machine-learning (including IoT), robotics, nanotechnology, 3-D printing, genetics and biotechnology coming to the fore.

The effects of these technologies would be further compounded by the rise of the mobile internet and cloud technology, enabling the rapid spread of internet-based service models, built around the IoT. The WEF said the rapid advance in technological innovation will cause “widespread disruption” not only to business models, but also to labour markets over the next five years.

Rueckert said such fears around robotics, artificial intelligence and applications linked to the IoT were

IoT Now - February / March 2016

▼

The greatest job losses, said the WEF, will happen in white-collar office and administrative roles. This loss is predicted to be partially offset by the creation of 2.1 million new jobs, mainly in more specialised “job families”, such as computing and mathematical or architecture and engineering disciplines.

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INTERVIEW

understandable, but that it was up to SAP and the other big technology players to manage the fears.

this figure came out of total group sales of €20.8 billion, SAP is predicting a lot more to come from its cloud related business – including IoT.

She says: “There will be new job profiles as a result of technological advancement. For instance, I often hear fears around the wider use of algorithms and the potential for people to lose control over processes, but it is human beings that are developing the algorithms.

It said: “By 2017, SAP continues to expect its rapidly growing cloud subscriptions and support revenue to be close to software license revenue, and is expected to exceed software license revenue in 2018. At that time, SAP expects to reach a scale in its cloud business that will clear the way for accelerated operating profit expansion.”

“If we are simply treating algorithms and other technology as a threat, we are not doing enough as a technology industry to uplift the intelligence of people. We must treat IoT and any other technology as an opportunity for human advancement.”

This is something that Sukamal Banerjee, global head of HCL Technologies' IoT Practice, agrees with. He says: “It may sound like an idea from a sci-fi movie, but as the capabilities of machines continue to evolve and become more complex, they will increasingly act as collaborative partners for humans.

“As we grow increasingly used to the helping hand machines can lend, working practices will evolve to include them, leading to a huge upturn in productivity. This will enable people to enjoy more engaging working practices, as mundane and routine tasks are transitioned to machine counterparts.”

Incidentally, two specific jobs that will be in strong demand by 2020, despite the jobs cull, said the WEF, include data analysts, which companies “expect will help them make sense of the torrent of data generated by the technological disruptions”.

And “specialised sales representatives”, as “practically every industry will need to become skilled in commercialising and explaining their offerings to clients”, the Forum said.

So SAP will clearly be at the centre of this job creation spurt as a result of its active and expanding cloud and related IoT business. This is demonstrated by its recent full year 2015 reported results.

A growing potential business SAP said cloud subscriptions and support revenue was €2.29 billion for the year (2014: €1.09 billion), an increase of 110 percent. While

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And this is something that Rueckert has her mind firmly set on. “SAP has a cloud-first strategy, but with IoT we are not trying to re-market existing solutions, we are building a differentiating IoT platform, applications and services to help our customers digitise their business process and create new business models.”

The major effort towards this end involves SAP offering a platform built around its big data processing engine HANA, which is already an established solution among companies that need fast processing and crunching of data generated across their business.

The newer and IoT-specific SAP HANA Cloud Platform for the IoT includes an asset management product, a predictive maintenance and service product, and several other solutions that firms need to manage, monitor, and support their growing numbers of connected devices.

SAP helps customers implement practical business solutions with a wide variety of cloudbased IoT solutions which include the SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service solution, SAP Connected Logistics software and the SAP Manufacturing Execution application. And the SAP HANA Cloud Platform offers open APIs that allow third-party providers to develop IoT applications.

Rueckert confirms: “Software is our business and we have no intention of manufacturing IoT sensors or other hardware - data processing and data analytics remains our core business. With the IoT, we know we or any company cannot do it on their own. We want to help develop and work towards accepted IoT industry standards and we want more partnerships.”

SAP is already partnering with German industrial conglomerate Siemens in building what is marketed as the Siemens Cloud for Industry. This

▼

“As we grow increasingly used to the helping hand machines can lend, working practices will evolve to include them, leading to a huge upturn in productivity”

IoT Now - February / March 2016

aims to be an open cloud platform for analysing large datasets across industries.

The effort includes allowing developers to build applications for Siemens Cloud for Industry that will be available through the SAP HANA store, as well as being available from the developers direct.

Security SAP is also involved in alliances when it comes to IoT security. Rueckert says: “We want to make sure that there is greater security across the entire IoT stack, especially when it comes to our products and services being used in missioncritical applications. This is also why we joined

the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC).”

The Consortium aims to accelerate and promote business use of the IoT. SAP is working with more than 150 other IIC members to deliver use cases, test beds, reference architecture and frameworks and security.

Rueckert says: “On alliances, security and standards we don't want to turn a positive into a negative, but we know we have to be even more visible in playing our full part in the development of a very fast growing market. But this really is a no-brainer for us as the IoT is already here and is set to be everywhere very soon.”

Tanja Rueckert, executive VP, IoT & Customer Innovation, SAP

IoT and the cloud The cloud, by providing a front-end management interface for IoT devices, offers organisations the scalability and flexibility they need to update and manage those devices. It can also provide the necessary online and shareable capacity to store the data collected from these connected devices.

A cloud-based management platform that can be located at a single location can control multiple IoT applications, and can provide the necessary data analytics to get the most out of this data for the benefit of organisations.

This contributes to efficient business processes, cuts IoT operational costs and helps the organisation to make greater returns from its technology investments.

IoT devices controlled in a cloud environment benefit from the classic scalability features of the cloud. They can be increased in number more quickly in response to the needs of the business using more efficient resource management.

What's required when running IoT devices in the cloud?

To efficiently run IoT devices in the cloud, organisations need authentication and security to ensure that data transferred between devices and applications is verified, authenticated and protected from security threats and malware.

They also need managed connectivity and device management to make sure IoT devices can be detected, monitored, updated and managed over the air across multiple mobile and fixed-line networks, and across various mixed network operators.

In addition, they require device data aggregation and analysis to ensure information - like temperature, location, usage data and other readings - is efficiently organised and stored ready for examination.

And, as the efficiency and speed of wireless networks improve, the ability of the cloud to control large-scale device deployments will support more streamlined and cost effective systems for enterprises.

The delivery of such cloud-based IoT solutions will be enabled through industry alliances across communications hardware specialists, data storage specialists, analytics software leaders and mobile operators.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

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MWC PREVIEW

The show of shows returns to Barcelona And so the calendar his ticked remorselessly onwards for yet another year and, once again, it’s time for our industry’s very own Show of Shows to burst into life and draw the crowds back to Barcelona.

Graham Trickey, GSMA

On top of the scene-setting keynote speeches, the conference will also have around 50 in-depth track sessions examining topics such as 5G, devices, digital commerce, disaster response, emerging markets, enterprise mobility, gaming, financial services, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile identity, privacy, security, smart cities and virtual reality/augmented reality, amongst others.

On the exhibition side, more than 2,100 companies are expected there, including global brands such as Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Ford Motor Company, Google, Huawei, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, SK Telecom, Sony Mobile Communications, Telefónica, VMware and Vodafone, among others. In addition, the show will also include a number of exhibits focusing on specific technology areas, including the Graphene Pavilion, Green Pavilion, IoT Pavilion, Mobile Money Pavilion and Wearables Pavilion, plus the usual country/regional pavilions as well.

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At the GSMA Innovation City located in Hall 3, stands 3A11 & 3A31, a 2,000 square metre display will bring to life common scenarios in urban and rural settings, demonstrating how mobile connectivity expands the possibilities for businesses and consumers.

The GSMA will also host several programmes and events focused on increasing diversity and driving inclusion in mobile.

Graham Trickey, Head of Connected Living, GSMA, sets the stage: “MWC will once again see an abundance of cutting-edge connected devices and services on show, demonstrating the substantial progress the mobile industry has made in advancing the IoT in the last year. To give attendees a hands-on glimpse into the future of how mobile-connected products are improving the lives of people all around the world, the GSMA will once again bring the Innovation City to Barcelona in partnership with AT&T, GMA, Jasper, KT Corporation and Sierra Wireless.”

He adds, “This year we also expect to see a range of use cases on display for the emerging Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) market, which represents a huge market opportunity as the IoT scales. LPWA services in licensed spectrum will be critical in ensuring customer choice and helping the IoT market to flourish. To accelerate the development of LPWA solutions, the GSMA’s

▼

The 2016 conference programme is packed with insight and opinion from a wide range of perspectives, featuring the usual cast of wellknown figures as well as a smattering of celebrities, such as three-time World Champion driver Lewis Hamilton, who will discuss how wireless technology is transforming the future of consumer automotive through motorsport.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

By planning over-the-air remote updates during the implementation of the smart grid, companies can avoid costly upgrades across thousands of installed devices, and better protect customer data

Industrial grade IoT For John Vladimir Slamecka, AT&T’s regional VP, EMEA, “At MWC, we think everyone will be talking about the IoT. It’s already on track to transform the way we work and live. IDC predicts the global market for IoT will nearly triple, reaching US$1.7 trillion, by 2020. According to Frost & Sullivan, nine billion devices are currently connected to the IoT; that will be between 20 billion and 50 billion by 2020.

“With this in mind, here are my predictions for both this show and the year ahead. Firstly, there’ll be a surge in industrial IoT applications and services. Maersk Line is already using AT&T IoT technology to connect nearly 280,000 of its refrigerated containers to track and monitor the condition of perishable goods; and it’s one of the largest industrial IoT deployments of its kind.

Here in Europe, we’ve also launched a managed IoT network for our customers, using a virtualised packet core.

“Secondly,” Slamecka adds, “people will be looking to protect their connected businesses. A report commissioned by us revealed that in 2014 there was a 458% increase in IoT vulnerability scans against devices. We recommend a multilayered approach to secure IoT devices. Finally, there’s the issue of supporting app developers. A joint study from AT&T and IDC last year showed that 73% of app developers are currently developing applications for the IoT. However, there are still challenges to overcome for them: finding the right focus; finding the right partner to bring effective apps to market and overcoming the lack of IoT training for developers.”

Caveat connector This growing concern about security is echoed by Amit Khetawat, director of Product Management at Aeris: “The IoT offers an environment rife with security challenges. At MWC 2016, we’ll see several sessions devoted to this issue, including ‘Securing the IoT Business’, ‘Connected living and securely scaling the IoT’, and ‘Securing the IoT’.

It’s a major topic as companies try to balance business needs with security and privacy demands to get the most of IoT systems.”

“In practice,” he suggests, “companies should benchmark what “normal” activity on their IoT network looks like to identify abnormal usage and unauthorised access, allowing them to act faster and prevent security concerns. The burgeoning utility industry could generate over US$1.4 billion by 2024 from fewer than 24 million

IoT Now - February / March 2016

connections, according to Machina Research. This means companies suffering even a moderate breach on their smart grids could leave crippled IoT networks, and customers and energy suppliers vulnerable. By planning over-the-air remote updates during the implementation of the smart grid, companies can avoid costly upgrades across thousands of installed devices, and better protect customer data.”

Similar concerns are raised by Jim McNeil, CMO, NETSCOUT (Hall 1 Stand 1C40): “Vendors need to start thinking about the bigger picture, specifically what happens if something goes wrong. For example, a few months ago, Arbor Networks, the security division of NETSCOUT, received its first Denial of Service attack from a household appliance. An overzealous refrigerator continually hit the home server to report that the owner was out of milk. The repeated ping was ultimately due to an error, but it still took place and did not cease. Imagine what would happen if every fridge, thermostat, and door lock was controlled to launch a scheduled DDoS attack.

The challenge associated with IoT security is real, and it’s growing every day.”

John Vladimir Slamecka, AT&T

Amit Khetawat, Aeris

McNeil adds, “This poses an important question about the role of the service provider in this relationship. As more and more IoT devices come online, causing the risk of them being attacked or compromised to increase dramatically, this has the potential to have a big impact on our society.

So, should there be a shared responsibility between the network provider and device manufacturer to appropriately secure our IoT future?”

And after the customer’s bought the connected device?

Along with a growing appreciation of the responsibility our industry must start to shoulder as more and more of the planet becomes reliant on the IoT, comes the attendant issue of support across the whole product-service lifecycle. James Kirkland, chief architect, IoT and Intelligent Systems, at Red Hat (Hall 2, stand 2G30) comments, “We’re starting to see a lot of commonality around challenges faced the day after deployment. That’s probably the most important change: IoT conversations are starting to focus on the solution’s entire life cycle postdeployment. Consumer implementations in particular will start requiring the same levels of reliability, performance, and data integrity as in Industrial IoT, especially when any drop in service can cause harm or when data protected by privacy regulations is being exchanged.

Jim McNeil, NETSCOUT

James Kirkland, Red Hat

Kirkland adds: “Devices can't just be placed out in the world and left unmanaged. Secure and functional devices require constant care and feeding and that includes the software! Which underscores another trend we’re seeing-how important it is for IT developers and operational app developers to adopt some of each other’s’ mindsets.” ▼

Mobile IoT Initiative is working with 27 of the world’s leading mobile operators, OEMs, chipset, module and infrastructure companies to roll out multiple global pilots in early 2016 with full commercial solutions starting later in the year.

We fully expect the debate around LPWA to be a central topic at Mobile World Congress.”

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MWC PREVIEW

James J. Nolan, InterDigital

Keith Bhatia, TCS

James J. Nolan, EVP InterDigital Solutions (Court 7, Stand 7A71) predicts an intermingling of issues around both security and that eternal factor –standards. “We have seen internet privacy and security become a large concern and both will be hot topics at this year’s Congress. We are increasingly seeing a move towards end-to-end solutions for security and privacy and as security capabilities at the device become more robust through the use of accelerators, these will evolve into standards and end-to-end security protocols to ensure secure IoT systems.

“Just as these security and privacy standards evolve,” Nolan says, “the adoption of standardsbased solutions will also be hot as businesses need confidence that their IoT investments are future proofed. Today, we’re beginning to see their adoption, such as the global oneM2M standard, which is very robust and which we support but, just as security and privacy is a continuous evolution, so too is standardisation.

We also expect to see a discussion around standards regarding LoRa and NB-IoT.”

Dude - where’s my device?

Rafi Zauer, Essence

Valerie RiffaudCangelosi, Epson

With the next release of LoRa due to deliver nonGNSS location functionality, positioning remains a hot topic in the IoT – both indoors and outdoors.

But don’t underestimate the challenge of locating IoT devices, says Keith Bhatia, Group VP of Mobility Solutions, TeleCommunication Systems, Inc. (TCS) (Hall 8, Stand 8.0C25): “Immediate access to highly precise information about an IoT device’s location is critical for enabling valueadded services and the associated revenue – but it can be challenging to obtain location information, particularly indoors. Take ‘small cells’, which cover roughly the same area as Wi-Fi access points and are frequently deployed indoors. They should enable more precise location of IoT devices, but this is often undermined by carrier aggregation, where an IoT service connects to multiple small cells.”

“However”, he suggests, “for IoT applications that require high precision even when using aggregated small cells, one solution is to leverage two other technologies: the increasing availability of Wi-Fi in public places, and the growing use of Bluetooth for proximity-based mobile marketing.

By using one or both, IoT applications can pinpoint a device, including in the third dimension, such as the floor-level in a building.”

The IoT – coming to an outlet near you

John Stuart, Thingworx

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One example of how consumer use of the IoT is growing will be demonstrated at MWC by Essence (Hall 5, Booth 5E71), showing how they’re bringing both Nest appliances and video surveillance to operators’ M2M/IoT offerings. Rafi

Zauer, head of marketing at Essence, explains, “Well be showing the latest enhancements to our end-to-end connected-living platforms for service providers: WeR@Home - for complete DIY home management, security, and safety; and Care@Home, a senior care solution focused on increasing the independence of the elderly.

“We’ll also be presenting several new developments. Having recently been awarded ‘Works with Nest’ approval, WeR@Home has integrated the Nest Self–Learning Thermostat, allowing end-users to disable the home’s heating/cooling system as soon as the house is empty. Another use case is the ability to immediately detect if doors have been left open, resulting in decreased energy efficiency. Nest’s ability to detect an empty home can automatically arm the home’s alarm system if homeowners have forgotten to do so. With our soon to be released video management platform, users will enjoy high quality video monitoring directly from their WeR@Home mobile app while service providers will gain new revenue opportunities through added playback and analytics capabilities.”

The IoT delivered direct to your eyes and mind – and your digital twin “The arrival of the IoT as a mainstream technology has been predicted at MWC for the past three years,” comments Valerie RiffaudCangelosi, New Markets development manager at Epson (Congress Square Stand CS100).

“However, when the data generated by IoT systems and networks is aggregated and made available through smart glasses, that same technology can create a workforce of ‘smart humans’. The key to a genuinely useful ‘Internet of Things’ relies on introducing a human element into a system of machines and this is logistically tricky. However, smart glasses allow humans to ‘plug in’ to an IoT network, hands-free. If the smart glasses also support augmented reality, it means that businesses can also interact with the world around them but with an added digital layer to make them ‘smarter’. At MWC 2016, we can expect to hear about how businesses will put smart glasses at the core of IoT systems, making workers more productive and streamlining their back end operations.”

Also making a pitch in the augmented reality stakes will be ThingWorx (Stand 8.0 C13 in the IoT Pavillon). John Stuart, DVP, ThingWorx Product Group says, “Using a smart connected Santa Cruz mountain bike, ThingWorx will demonstrate how digital transformation can be achieved through Digital Twin and Augmented Reality technology. PTC will also unveil its complete IoT strategy, which is strengthened by its recent acquisition of ColdLight, Vuforia and Kepware. The acquisition of these market-leading companies will help us extend our factory ▼

Standards, standards, standards

IoT Now - February / March 2016

The big, bigger, biggest picture When it comes to the wider vision of how the IoT might change business, lifestyles, cities and even what it means to be human, there’s going to be no shortage of opinions flying around the event.

Gareth Mackown, Partner, IBM Interactive Experience, positions his company in the fray: “This year, IBM will be bringing to MWC a range of demonstrations, case studies and industry thought leadership, including cognitive robotics running on Bluemix, Interactive walls and talks centred around the concept of cognitive mobility: OutThink Disruption. We will be focusing on how companies can differentiate between just committing random acts of digital and being an actual digital business where transformation is led by digital disruption and, importantly, enabled by mobile and IOT. Our 2016 IBV Digital Transformation Study ranked the Internet of Things as the #1 new era technology affecting cross-industry operations. The increasing proliferation of new devices/wearables/sensors and the resulting interactions is now generating vast volumes of data, highlighting the need to coordinate and make sense of experiences in a more complex environment. Applying cognitive computing capabilities to this challenge is where businesses can truly differentiate.”

Connected cars and living spaces According to Macario Namie, VP of Strategy, Jasper (Hall 3, 3A11), one focus will be on connected vehicles: “In 2016 in the US, the majority of new vehicles produced will be connected cars, and it is likely that embedded connectivity will be the norm for all new vehicles produced worldwide within the next several years. The connected car was a dominant trend at CES earlier this year and will be prominent throughout MWC as will another major trend – autonomous vehicles. Smart Cities is also hot on everyone’s agenda, while Low Power Wireless Area Network (LPWAN) technologies hold a lot of promise for the IoT.” Karthikeyan Natarajan, senior VP & global head, Integrated Engineering Solutions, Tech Mahindra (5G51, Hall 5) also highlights this area – but in a wider context: “Connected cars are just one example. Who would have guessed a decade ago that quicker life cycles, OTA updates and the user experience would become important considerations for auto makers? Disruptors like Uber and the creation of a new market: ‘On demand mobility’, means OEMs must re-consider what car ‘ownership’ means and automotive companies are starting to think like consumer electronics and software companies. It’s creating new opportunities for OEMs, who now need partners to manage this software complexity.”

IoT Now - February / March 2016

Additionally, the whole wider connected environment seems now to be coming alive.

Remy Marcotorchino, director, Marketing and Market Strategy, Sierra Wireless, comments: “At MWC 2016 we’ll see more conversations around smart city solutions, as part of an industry quest for cleaner, greener, safer urban environments. By 2050, it is predicted that 70% of the world will be living in urban environments. This will create significantly more demand – and stress – on energy, water, public safety, transportation, and waste management systems – but also offer unprecedented opportunities for ICT leaders to help make significant improvements to efficiency and resource utilisation.

“The IoT offers new models for cities to significantly enhance livability – a concept that I believe we’ll see a much greater focus on at MWC in particular. In fact, at Sierra Wireless we’ll be giving our own demonstrations around smart parking and smart car applications, healthcare and wearables, as part of the more central GSMA Innovation City. This impending collision of innovation, new business models and citizen engagement is at the heart of the smart city revolution happening today.

Gareth Mackown, IBM

Macario Namie, Jasper

“Smart Cities,” Marcotorchino concludes, “are really about data, analytics and intelligent decision-making, starting with the collection and communication of data to help cities manage everything more efficiently. The opportunity also resides in allowing cross departmental city-wide initiatives, effectively breaking silos so that fixed and mobile assets are able to interact with other departmental systems.”

Supporting the wider technology environment – in development Considerable effort is also being expended in the IoT to simplify, optimise and improve the technical environment that IoT services and devices are developed and have to operate in.

Guy Kaplinsky, president and founder of IQP Corporation, explains his company’s approach: “During MWC we'll be demoing the IQP nonprogramming Development Environment for cross platform IoT/M2M Apps and Enterprise Applications. It supports rapid code-free application creation by anyone – from end-users to sophisticated programmers, using a webbased visual programming interface. IQP offers a complete IoT development solution, from connectivity with sensors and control devices to app customisation and design templates.”

Kaplinsky adds, “We’ve also just released two new widgets that address IIoT, retail, security and other sensor-related applications. One widget supports data collection and monitoring from live streaming video from remote sources. It can also support a video chat or sending/receiving data from one End App to another End App. The second widget supports interactive mapping – ▼

automation footprint and accelerate our entry into the industrial Internet of Things.”

Karthikeyan Natarajan, Tech Mahindra

Remy Marcotorchino, Sierra Wireless

Guy Kaplinsky, IQP Corporation

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MWC PREVIEW

the user uploads an image map (production line, store other facility) and then defines positions where sensors can be placed. The process is simple; the user just drags a widget that is connected to an IQP ‘query’ (a query is connected to the actual sensor, data or image that is being visualised). In run-time mode it’s easy to visualise exact state of the defined sensors and receive real-time event notifications in case of changes.”

Guy Reiffer, Starhome Mach

Supporting the wider technology environment – in roaming

Steve Newton, Aria Networks

Jonathan Borrill, Anritsu

Guy Reiffer, VP of Marketing & Partnerships at Starhome Mach identifies a growing problem: “An evaluation jointly carried out by Starhome Mach and Machina Research has concluded that MNOs need to pay more attention to the impact of M2M roaming on their networks as this doubled in the last 12 months. Machina Research estimates 350 million cellular-based connections worldwide, which will grow to 1.3 billion over the next five years.

The proportion of M2M connections accounted for by roaming is growing even faster. As a global provider of roaming services including billing and clearing to network operators, Starhome Mach determined that the number of roaming registrations attributed to M2M devices increased by 100% last year to reach 7% of all roamers.

“Starhome Mach has developed the next big thing in IoT – HD IoT. As part of this development, we recently demonstrated the ability to add business logic to the download of virtual eSIMS, streamlining the ability to decide when and how to ‘localise’ devices in complex global deployments. Decisions need to take into account the costs in each country, the available quality of service (QoS) and other options that might be available such as permanent roaming.”

Supporting the wider technology environment – avoiding network congestion Steve Newton, CEO at Aria Networks, makes a prediction: “Undoubtedly a lot of the chatter at MWC will be around network optimisation - how to sweat the infrastructure for the best return on investment. The big challenge around this is understanding increasingly complex user demands - particularly in light of the IoT meaning many more devices will be vying for

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network demand. I would like to hear serious discussion about how networks can be configured, re-configured and run with zero or minimum human touch. The 'Breathing Network' (one that expands and contracts with demand) optimised to deliver business objectives is increasingly important as volumes of connections rise.”

Newton adds, “In Barcelona, I expect to hear more about how SDN and NFV are now becoming reality. Aria Networks believes the way to tackle automation is using artificial intelligence in the orchestration layer so the network can then decide when to make changes, what these should be and where they should take place. When IoT is being discussed in the Fira, I want people to consider which applications should the network prioritise? Healthcare, for example, could be a matter of life and death, so optimising networks to prioritise this should be high on the agenda of operators focussing on e-health solutions.”

Supporting the wider technology environment – through testing “In 2015, the connected car was a big feature for MWC and the M2M/IoT market, but the connected home is expected to quickly become an important market for IoT, as home electronics also have relatively short design/product life cycles and consumer buying habits that enable a more rapid adoption of the technology,” says Jonathan Borrill, director of Engineering and Technology, Anritsu (EMEA).

Borrill explains: “Connected home deployment scenarios combine cellular and short range wireless modules for an integrated solution, and at MWC we’ll be presenting a test bed in collaboration with the University of Hertfordshire for wireless home automation. Using intelligent switches and electrical plug controlled by ZigBee, managed by a home gateway using cellular backhaul to communicate with the cloud and provide remote user control, the test bed features the Anritsu MD8475A network simulator to provide the cellular air interface. The IoT test benches from Anritsu also feature Cat0 LTE device testing with Power Saving Mode, including Protocol Conformance Test. Our IoT production line test solution, the MT8870A, is also demonstrating multi-standards testing of simultaneous cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, including 802.11p automotive device testing to support the latest vehicle to vehicle standards.”

IoT Now - February / March 2016

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CASE STUDY

iManage™, a Numerex Solution, delivers cost savings to a large manufacturer via supply chain optimisation An industry-leading manufacturing company with annual revenues in excess of $37B engages multiple suppliers to regularly ship containers to various manufacturing locations and to multiple supplier locations. To ensure the manufacturing supply chain process is not interrupted, containers are often required to be shipped on short notice. To keep these high value assets safe while in transit, the company utilises specialised containers to ship parts.

These containers are limited and require constant monitoring by plant managers, logistics coordinators and inventory supervisors to ensure availability. If containers are not available, the supply chain is delayed. Finished product shipments are impacted, causing significant operational and production costs, thus reducing margins and revenue. The manual tracking of containers is a time consuming and manual labour intensive process. The manufacturing company needed greater visibility of actual activity to balance planned activity against operational decisions. The company approached Numerex to find solutions to maximize efficiency.

The solution Numerex’s supply chain optimisation solution, iManage, built on nxFAST® platform holds the answer. Including tracking devices, wireless network connectivity, and a cloud-based application the Numerex iManage solution

enables location reporting for the shipping containers and leverages that information to provide advanced data analytics. The solution is configured to collect data from the tracking devices on a regular basis and deliver reports, alerts and notifications as appropriate. iManage provides visibility into SLA compliance and performance against defined business rules and metrics. Utilising this approach enables the company to better allocate resources, increase production efficiency and prevents unnecessary acquisition of inventory, carrying costs, and expediting expenses.

The solution deployed across multiple product lines at the customer’s manufacturing facilities and at key vendor locations. Notifications via email and SMS text inform stake holders of critical changes that may require immediate attention. The customer has access to tools that support long-life device management and a flexible system configuration to match their enterprise business rules, metrics and management. Battery life is also managed efficiently based on individual device load.

An industry-leading manufacturing company with annual revenues in excess of $37B engages multiple suppliers to regularly ship containers to various manufacturing locations and to multiple supplier locations

The results Numerex enables the manufacturing company to increase visibility in its supply chain by identifying optimal product deployment. iManage is an IoT system capable of providing live geographic visibility, tracking, and insightful asset management. ▼

The challenge

IN ASSOCIATION WITH NUMEREX IoT Now - February / March 2016

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CASE STUDY

The customer has access to tools that support longlife device management and a flexible system configuration to match their enterprise business rules, metrics and management

iManage empowers the customer to: • Reduce purchases of new containers and transportation of components in unauthorised containers • Realise cost savings in resource allocation • Minimise transportation of components in unauthorised containers • Realise better asset protection and loss control • Reduce operations and transportation costs

Features • Location, movement, dwell and cycle time tracking • Dashboard views with advanced analytics

• Email and text alerts — notifies professionals of problems • Configurable device reporting schedules • Integrated mapping visualisation

Benefits • Improves material flow and inventory management • Prevents manufacturing floor stoppage • Significantly reduces expedited shipping charges • Provides data for tracking compliance with 3PL SLAs • Mitigates loss or theft of shipping racks or containers

Waypoint #1 Factory Dwell Time - 2 Days

Waypoint #5 Rack Management Center

Threshold Max Count - 14 Min Count - 4

Dwell Time - 2 Days

((((( ALERT! )))))

Threshold

Waypoint #2 Transit

Max Count - 16 Min Count - 5

Dwell Time - 4 Days

Waypoint #3 Supplier Dwell Time - 2 Days

Threshold

Waypoint #4 Transit Dwell Time - 4 Days

Max Count - 20 Min Count - 12

iManage™ Value Chain

((((( ALERT! ))))) Waypoint #5 Supplier Dwell Time - 2 Days

Threshold

Waypoint #4 Transit Dwell Time - 4 Days

Max Count - 15 Min Count - 10

iManage™, is a manufacturing optimisation solution built on Numerex’s cloud-based horizontal delivery platform. iManage helps manufacturers optimise production by wirelessly tracking, managing, and analysing the flow of production parts, assemblies, and racks between factories and suppliers. The solution alerts professionals in the event of a stoppage, slowdown, or problem. iManage enables tracking of parts and assemblies across multiple plants and suppliers. The solution allows supply chain professionals to take proactive actions to ensure that production facilities continue to operate without interruption, material shortages, or expedited-shipping charges.

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IoT Now - February / March 2016

The IoT Enablemennt Company As global leader in connecting distributed devices, Eurotech wo orks with world-class ecosystem partners to deliver best in class building g blocks that make up the Internet of Things.

ANALYST REPORT

Morgan Mullooly is an analyst in Analysys Mason’s Digital Economy practice, and co-leader of Analysys Mason’s IoT and M2M Solutions programme. A respected voice on M2M and IoT matters and a sought-after speaker at industry events, he is also on the judging panel for the Best Mobile Innovation for Automotive category of the GSMA’s Global Mobile Awards 2016. He has a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics.

AT&T and the Connected Car AT&T’S Drive platform is well positioned to support the infotainment services of the future, writes analyst Morgan Mullooly from Analysys Mason’s IoT and M2M Solutions programme.

The connected car is expected to be one of the largest M2M opportunities for telecoms operators. The challenge for the operators however is how to move beyond basic connectivity revenues and win a significant share of the value of broader connected car services. AT&T’s response to this has been to develop its AT&T Drive platform which has the potential to be a marketplace for those involved in the connected car infotainment services market – both connected car suppliers (technology vendors and application developers) and automotive OEMs (and their customers). AT&T’s ability to extend its automotive connectivity deals and engage the interest of app and solution developers will be crucial to the success of its connected car strategy.

AT&T is already the leading provider of connectivity to cars Analysys Mason estimates that new passenger car sales will grow at a CAGR of 5.5% worldwide between 2015 and 2020.

By 2019, we expect that the majority of cars produced will be connected. This will be a boon for telcos at a time when revenues from other services are flat or in decline.

To protect itself in the long term and provide services that offer greater differentiation than connectivity alone, AT&T is eager to become a key player in the connected car value chain. It aims to achieve this by developing ‘AT&T Drive’, a difficult-to-replicate service for OEMs in the form of a cloudbased platform which can support OEMs’ proprietary infotainment systems.

AT&T is developing an ecosystem of partners and developers around its AT&T Drive platform AT&T Drive brings together a disparate set of technology partners (such as Ericsson, Jasper, Qualcomm and VoiceBox) with unique competencies such as billing and partnership management, speech recognition and natural-language understanding (see Figure 2). This ‘platform of platforms’ allows OEMs and third-party developers to focus on with what they do best – building vehicles and apps.

End consumer

AT&T has been busily diversifying its customer base by building Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for various vertical markets – including the automotive industry. Indeed, it is already the world’s leading embedded connectivity service provider for the automotive sector. The carrier added 1 million connected cars to its network in 2Q 2015 (see Figure 1). This growth outstripped handset subscriber growth and brought the total number of vehicles that AT&T supports with embedded connectivity to 4.8 million.

Auto OEM in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system In this case, the apps and app store of the IVI system is powered by AT&T Drive.

AT&T Drive Platform This platform aggregates and integrates platforms from partners such as Ericsson, Jasper, VoiceBox and others

1250 1000

741 750

AT&T Drive can add richness to OEMs’ infotainment systems in the USA and beyond

250

0 -95 -250

Reseller

Connected devices-other

Branded consumer

Connected devices-cars

Figure 1: Net subscriber additions, AT&T Mobility, 2Q 2015

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Third-party developers For example, iHeart Radio, Streetline, Urgent.ly and others

Figure 2: Simplified view of the AT&T Drive platform [Source: Analysys Mason, 2015]

448

500

In-house developers For example, AT&T has developed a Digital Life and U-Verse app for Connected Drive

AT&T’s connected car services are modular, meaning that automotive OEMs can start off by using the carrier’s managed connectivity services, and then later extend this to include the infotainment capabilities enabled by the AT&T Drive platform.

In countries where AT&T does not have local network coverage, it has the ability to contract a partner carrier to ▼

Net adds (thousands)

1000

IoT Now - February / March 2016

Connected infotainment strategy of automotive OEM

Embedded connectivity

Approach to services

Benefits to automotive OEM

Disadvantages to automotive OEM

Value to the automotive OEM

Option 1 – Connectivity and unique connected car services

• Yes

• Many unique services • Complemented by over-the-top (OTT) apps

• Lots of differentiation for the automotive OEM

• Can be hard for automotive OEMs to develop applications and attract third party developers • Expensive

• High

Option 2 – Connectivity and OTT services

• Yes

• Few unique services • Focus on OTT apps

• Customers are provided with lots of services

• Limited differentiation – most services are widely available

• Medium

Option 3 – Unique and OTT services

• No

• Some unique services • Complemented by OTT apps

• Lower cost

• Dependence on smartphone • Medium connectivity can damage user experience • Limited differentiation

Figure 3: Features of selected potential embedded

provide local connectivity for its OEMs and still provide access to the cloud-based AT&T Drive platform to power the OEMs’ infotainment systems. This means that OEMs can use the same infotainment approach in other countries than the USA.

AT&T is enhancing its OEM and developer bases to ensure the long-term success of the AT&T Drive platform

AT&T Drive will compete alongside OTT services from other players striving for dominance in the connected car value chain

As with all platforms or marketplaces, more end customers will attract more suppliers and, in turn, more suppliers should attract more customers. The challenge for AT&T is how to attract more customers (in effect, more automotive OEMs) and more suppliers (app developers). It is now tackling both of these.

Figure 3 lists some of the options considered by automotive OEMs for connected car services (although it should be noted that this is a simplified list, as other options are possible).

AT&T Drive is aiming to help automotive OEMs pursue the most valuable approach, Option 1. By offering services to a large number of automotive OEMs, AT&T should be in a better position to attract developers than automotive OEMs who act independently, and AT&T can spread the costs of developing the Drive service across a larger base.

While the AT&T Drive platform is designed to help automotive OEMs define the native infotainment experience, a number of other OTT platforms are also vying for dominance in the provision of connected car infotainment. These platforms include Apple CarPlay, the Connected Car Consortium’s MirrorLink and Google’s Android Auto.

These OTT platforms will exist in parallel with the native infotainment experience (see Figure 3, which describes how these OTT platforms can fit into the infotainment strategies of automotive OEMs). Typically, they synchronise smartphone apps and content to vehicle infotainment systems, and enable vehicles to ‘piggyback’ on smartphone-based connectivity, offering customers familiar interfaces and access to their handset’s app library. Many OEMs have already made commitments to integrate these OTT platforms in their vehicles alongside the native infotainment experience. These OTT platforms will provide an alternative way for end users to access services, meaning that the native experience, which AT&T hopes to support, may be side-lined by solution developers and end users.

Despite competition from these digital economy heavyweights, Joe Mosele, VP IoT Business Solutions at AT&T says: “Right now, other technology providers are making a lot of headlines - and they will be mass market eventually - but they only offer OEMs a one-size-fits-all solution. It is the same user interface and user experience regardless of what brand values are held by the individual OEMs. We believe that we have tremendous capabilities to help OEMs create an alternative native experience supported by the AT&T Drive platform that would be customised and a differentiator for each OEM.”

IoT Now - February / March 2016

• AT&T is cultivating a developer base for AT&T Drive. A potential stumbling block for AT&T is that the AT&T Drive platform represents just one possible outlet for connectedcar service providers and app developers.

While AT&T has established a number of partnerships with credible and innovative app developers such as Urgent.ly and Streetline, there is some concern that it will struggle to capture developer support on the same scale as the likes of Apple and Google which are entering the connected-car value chain.

AT&T has stated that the extensive support that Apple and Google derive from the developer community is not a critical concern for the success of AT&T Drive. According to Jared Peterson, IoT lead marketing manager at AT&T: “So much of the developer mind-set is to find the money related to distribution and opportunity. In North America we have such a dominant position in terms of number of connected cars we support – this translates into a huge opportunity for the modest number of serious app developers that we work closely with.”

• AT&T is extending its existing OEM relationships globally.

AT&T is already a leading provider of connectivity for automotive OEMs in the USA. Mosele says: “We have announced connectivity deals with nine of the top automotive brands, so we are able to show our developer community that we have that scale they require to make them very interested in developing for the AT&T Drive platform.”

AT&T is now starting to extend those connectivity deals to other regional markets. For example, with the help of a regional carrier partner it recently began providing connectivity for General Motors’ OnStar connected-car service in Europe. The attractiveness for developers of developing for the AT&T Drive platform will increase as AT&T’s USA-originated connected-car relationships extend internationally.

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IOT MASTERCLASS

Understanding data privacy in a fully connected society The IoT community has to ensure that the changes that it’s making to the world are safe and affect people and organisations for the better. One critical issue here involves the ethics of data usage.

Saverio Romeo, principal analyst at Beecham Research, recently spoke with Dr. Kat Hadjimatheou, senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Ethics Research Group at the University of Warwick, and a specialist in the ethics of security and surveillance technologies.

SR: The IoT community is creating spaces for us to live and work in which are connected and intelligent – from fitness trackers to temperature sensors. What are the ethical issues involved in such a fully connected society?

KH: There are essentially three key considerations, starting with the kinds of information that are being processed. Some kinds of information are considered inherently private involving intimate aspects of our lives, such as our friendships, families, sex lives, and our health. Information about our energy consumption or purchasing habits isn’t inherently private, but this doesn’t mean we want it shared with everybody.

This leads me to the second consideration, namely who’s viewing the information. Most of us don't mind non-intimate information about us - such as our energy consumption or our purchasing habits - being collected so we can receive better deals from our energy providers, or advertising that reflects our preferences. At the same time however, most people would feel uncomfortable about their purchasing histories being shared with their mother-in-law, even if she might buy them a more appropriate Christmas present. Alternatively, even with some very intimate information, there are usually some people we happily share it with, such as doctors. In order to preserve privacy, we need to be able to choose who we share information with.

This leads us very conveniently to the third consideration whether we have any choice about the kinds of information collected and what’s done with it. A 'liberal' society such as ours is built partly upon the belief that people should as far as possible be free to decide many things for themselves. For example, most people believe that living a healthy lifestyle should be a matter of personal choice, and not something imposed by others. Even if it is better for us to have connected devices that monitor our food consumption and exercise, we believe people should have a choice about whether to adopt such devices. This does not however mean that everything should be a matter of choice - some of the decisions we make about our own bodies affect the wellbeing of others.

For example, it is nowadays commonly accepted that one's personal choice to smoke should not affect others.

Nevertheless, in a liberal society personal choice is always very important and must be taken into account. Technologies and systems that enable fine-grained choices, at different points in the process of technology adoption, are better than those that offer only a one-off, single chance to 'agree' or 'disagree'.

More opportunities to consent or opt-out decrease the risk of what is known as 'function' or 'mission' creep. Mission creep occurs when data collected for one purpose is then used for another. Some smart metering systems collect temperature

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data - which can also be used to determine how many people are at home. If people sign up to a system to know when to turn the radiators on or off doesn’t mean that they’ve also signed up to a system that monitors the number of people in the house.

SR: Many believe that privacy by design should be a fundamental criteria in designing IoT solutions. How do you define privacy by design?

KH: Privacy by design means building privacy concerns into the design of technologies, processes, and systems right from the start. One of the basic principles involves data minimisation. This means collecting only the amount of data necessary to fulfil the specific functions of the device/system involved and reduces the risk of function or mission creep.

Most of us also feel that a system which involves automatic processing of data with no human involvement is less intrusive than one which involves people actually accessing that data.

SR: The IoT community believes that data is strategic – in business and service terms. In order to fully exploit that potential, there is a school of thought that believes in data openness. From an ethical perspective, how do you see data openness?

KH: It depends what kind of data is being discussed!

Obviously, making the code for very intrusive surveillance software open-source is not a sensible idea, given the risk of cyber criminality, misuse by authoritarian regimes, not to mention terrorism. For people unlucky enough to live in human-rights abusing regimes, encryption is a vital tool to preserve their privacy. Less dramatically, the collation of data from different sources can identify individuals who believe that they’re interacting anonymously. Data openness is good when it involves governments operating in a democracy, because transparency and accountability are implicit. By contrast, customers do not owe transparency to the companies they do business with. Businesses who collect data about their customers have a duty of care to those people to process the data in ways that do not infringe on their privacy, even when customers have, perhaps unthinkingly, clicked that 'agree' button.

Dr. Kat Hadjimatheou is a researcher with the University of Warwick’s Interdisciplinary Ethics Research Group. As well as publishing academic articles on the ethics of policing, security technologies, border control, trafficking and surveillance, she has also produced a report on the ethics of border control for the EU Borders agency FRONTEX and consulted on their code of ethics. She has additionally worked on a number of EU-funded security research projects focusing on these issues including DETECTER and SURVEILLE.

IoT Now - February / March 2016

IOT MASTERCLASS

Miguel Angel Garcia Matatoros, managing director, BlueTC

Making the move towards tailored M2M connectivity services As many mobile operators’ voice and text revenues continue to plummet, they’re keen to expand their share of the growing IoT market. However, their strategies vary significantly and, in some cases, go far beyond offering just connectivity services. But, before diversifying their portfolios to include a series of richer and more IoT-focused services targeted at different vertical sectors, we believe that they need to first control, enhance and perfect their core offering: the actual M2M connectivity. This involves putting both passive and active network monitoring systems in place as only then will the operators have the best starting point from which to create outstanding services and monetise their M2M connectivity services.

A complex market with diverging needs The IoT market is far from homogenous as far as both suppliers and users are concerned. Connectivity needs vary significantly from one vertical sector to another, and also from one IoT solution or customer to another. Some solutions will require high speed 24/7, while others will need reliable - but only sporadic - connectivity, maybe just enough to send or receive a data package once a day, week or month. But all of them require reliability if IoT services are to be delivered correctly and guaranteed by SLAs. Operators are not offering just connectivity but IoT service delivery assurance. Access to information on network performance and the ability to control this therefore becomes key.

Commodity connectivity or tailored services?

Customer diversity also means that there is no such thing as a “standard M2M connectivity plan”. Operators should therefore fully exploit the possibilities of designing tailored connectivity, support and service plans for specific groups of IoT customers - or even uniquely individual ones for each customer.

In order to do this however, they first have to understand the verticals’ businesses, have partners that can supply that insight, or gain expertise through acquisitions. Most operators have clear strategies on what vertical sectors to focus on while others, like Tele2, have chosen a horizontal strategy that enables them to serve any vertical. In the case of Tele2, they have a comprehensive offer built around their IoT platform and provide not just global, secure mobile access, but also services for automating, controlling and optimising IoT connectivity.

Today, Blue Telecom Consulting (BlueTC®) works with Tele2 to monitor their cellular networks and also provides its M2M Active Monitoring Solution directly to Tele2’s IoT customers through a partnering agreement. Irrespective though of the market strategy chosen by M2M operators, SLAs must be fulfilled if customers are to be kept satisfied. The loss of a

single customer could mean thousands of SIM cards – and the revenues they produce - disappearing. Consequently, trust should be established early on in negotiations, with specific connectivity and other needs met from day one and the best way of doing this is by providing guarantees through customer-specific SLAs. When issues do arise, which inevitably happens, the underlying reasons must be promptly identified and fixed before any vertical customer - or their own end customers - are affected.

Enhanced connectivity services and differentiated plans One of the additional options available here involves closely controlling the actual quality and specific network parameters delivered to different IoT customer groups. However, in order to achieve this they must first know exactly what is going on in both their own and in their roaming partners’ networks. Not just through the passive monitoring that all operators perform in some way, but instead via active monitoring that permits testing certain use cases, accurately emulating real customer situations and experiences. Additionally, with steered roaming, M2M devices can be forced to connect to certain other networks under certain conditions. When a system that can comprehensively monitor and analyse relevant network parameters is in place, trigger alarms may be programmed to issue alerts, or even automatically fix issues. A well-designed monitoring system allows M2M operators to offer guarantees that specific SLAs will be fully met and provide quantitative proof that that quality was delivered. This again enables them to develop categories of connectivity, with different SLAs at different price levels, and create new revenue streams.

Such monitoring systems already exist and BlueTC’s M2M Active Monitoring Solution can rapidly be deployed in any 2G, 3G or 4G network, independently of its owner, starting locally and small or going for large scale and global monitoring, or a mix of the two. Active monitoring of the quality and performance of M2M networks must be an implicit and complementary part of any M2M operator connectivity offering.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH BlueTC IoT Now - February / March 2016

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EVENTS

Industry of Things World USA 2016 San Diego, USA 25-26 February 2016 www.industryofthingsworldusa.com

The Industrial IoT USA Summit Chicago, USA 14-15 April 2016 www.industrialiotseries.com/usa/

TM Forum Live 2016 Nice, France 9-12 May 2016 www.tmforumlive.org

Delivery of Things World Berlin, Germany 25-26 April 2016 www.deliveryofthingsworld.com

Insurance IoT Europe Summit

European Smart Grid Cyber Security

London, UK 7-8 June 2016 www.fc-bi.com/insuranceiot

London, UK 7-8 March 2016 www.smartgridcybersecurity.co.uk/iot

M2M World Congress 2016 Smart Home Summit - Germany Frankfurt, Germany 6-7 April 2016 germany.smarthomesummit.net

London, UK 26-27 April 2016 www.m2mconference.com

Internet of Things World 2016 San Francisco, USA 10-12 May 2016 www.iotworldevent.com

IoT Global Innovation Forum Barcelona, Spain 15-16 June 2016 www.iotglobalforum.com

5th Annual Social Media in the Utilities Sector Conference London, UK 11-12 April 2016 www.socialmediautilities.com

Smart Cities India 2016 Exhibition and Conference Smart IoT Show London, UK 12-13 April 2016 www.smartiotlondon.com

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New Delhi, India 11-13 May, 2016 www.smartcitiesindia.com

Security of Things World 2016 Berlin, Germany 27-28 June 2016 www.securityofthingsworld.com

IoT Now - February / March 2016

Know your stuff.

Knowledge, as you know, is power. As a single-source provider, Numerex empowers enterprise operations with world-class, managed IoT solutions that are simple, innovative, scalable, and secure. We simplify the complexity of machine interconnectivity—enabling the Internet of Things—so you can solve business challenges, produce new revenue Z[YLHTZ JYLH[L VWLYH[PUN LMÄ JPLUJPLZ HUK PTWYV]L `V\Y IV[[VT SPUL ;V Ä UK V\[ TVYL JHSS LTHPS PUMV'U\TLYL_ JVT VY ]PZP[ U\TLYL_ JVT

© 2015 Numerex Corp. All rights reserved. Numerex is a registered mark of Numerex Corp.

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 • VOLUME 6 • ISSUE 1

D TE R O PP SU

IoT Now: ISSN 2397-2793

BY

LoRa SUPPLEMENT Stream Technologies on LoRa - and more

MULTITECH Daniel Quant on helping to grow the LoRa ecosystem

PLUS: Contributions and insight into LoRa from Geoff Mulligan, Semtech, Actility, Senet and more

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iotglobalnetwork.com

CONTENTS SUPPORTED BY

LoRa In the space of just over a year, LoRa - since its launch at MWC 2015 – has developed a considerable head of steam, to draw a metaphor from the first industrial revolution. With over 200 current members developing a rich and innovative community ecosystem, IoT Now thought that it was time that we dedicated a special supplement to take a first, closer look at what could turn out to be the truly seminal IoT networking technology of the next few years.

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9

Nigel Chadwick and Alan Tait of Stream Technologies talk about their work with Lora and the role that their IoT-X platform can play

Machina Research’s principal analyst Aapo Markkanen examines how LoRa’s developing and evaluates the different factors that may drive – or hinder – its growth

11 IoT Now’s Alun Lewis provides a swift snapshot from the front lines of LoRa deployments and application and product development

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Geoff Mulligan, chairman of the LoRa Alliance on the philosophy of openness that underpins this now thriving community

Daniel Quant of MultiTech Systems, a founding member of the LoRa Alliance, speaks about recent and future important developments in both organisations

PUBLISHED BY:

WeKnow Media Ltd. Suite 138, 70 Churchill Square, Kings Hill, West Malling, Kent ME19 4YU, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807411

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

© WeKnow Media Ltd 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, stored, published or in any way reproduced without the prior written consent of the Publisher.

3

NEWS

LoRa® Alliance 1st Anniversary networking reception at MWC February 24th 17:30-20:00pm The LoRa Alliance held its first ever meeting at MWC 2015 and will be celebrating its first anniversary at the same venue. The Alliance has grown to over 200 members in less than a year making it one of the fastest growing alliances. It invites people to visit, network, and learn from its members what networks have been deployed around the world, what applications LoRaWAN™ is delivering real world value to and how LoRaWAN is becoming the secure, carrier grade

IoT connectivity – another way from everynet?

standard of choice for low power radio networks for the IoT. The event will take place at the Hotel Miramar Barcelona, Mediterranean Room, Plaza Carlos Ibáñez, 308038, Barcelona. Please contact Alessandra Mongardi at amongardi@inventures.com to request an invitation.

This is an invitation-only event and transport to the Miramar will be available to invited guests. This event is kindly sponsored by Cisco.

The founders of everynet already have experience in rolling out IoT Networks, with 30 million people covered in Russia, 400K smart meters being rolled out in St Petersburg, and now new trials are being deployed in the UK and North America. Tracy Hopkins, marketing committee chair of the LoRa Alliance and LPWA IoT expert has joined everynet as regional head for EMEA & APAC.

The LoRa Alliance at MWC IoT Pavilion, Hall 8, Booth E10 The Alliance will be showcasing its entire LoRaWAN ecosystem and will have demonstrations running live on a LoRaWAN Network in Barcelona. There will be LoRa 101 sessions with development kits, Q&A sessions on its Certification Program and IoT Products that an be used today.

Libelium gets LoRa Alliance Certification on its LoRaWAN sensor lines

In the meantime, learn more about LoRaWAN, watch the introductory video or download the white paper: www.lora-alliance.org/What-IsLoRa/LoRa-Videos www.lora-alliance.org/What-IsLoRa/LoRa-White-Papers

Libelium claims its sensor products Waspmote and Plug & Sense!- have become the world’s first hardware devices to pass the LoRa Alliance’s LoRaWAN Certification Program.

Module RN2483, integrated in Waspmote, comes from Microchip, the Libelium provider of microcontrollers, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP solutions, and meets the functional requirements of the latest LoRaWAN 1.0 protocol specification, for operation in the 868 MHz license-free band.

Join the LoRa Alliance, find out the benefits, membership levels and how you can contribute: www.loraalliance.org/Join/Become-a-Member

The US version of the new Microchip module, the RN2903 for operation in 915 MHz band, will be released to the market in the following months.

The LoRa Alliance All Members Meeting and Open House April 4-6th 2016 The Hyatt, Santa Clara, California, USA The Alliance will be holding its third All Members Meeting and Open House on the 4th to 6th April, 2016. This will be its first meeting in North America and will include an Open House for nonmembers on the 6th Aril. There will be a LoRa 101 training session, speed networking and the popular Open Market Place. Full agenda and registration details will be made available shortly.

Contact amongardi@inventures.com for more details.

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everynet, a new global network operator company is being launched in the UK to provide IoT connectivity that the company says will deliver scale, both from technical and business model perspectives. The company says that an exciting and innovative Partner Program will also democratise LPWA networks and provide an option radically different to existing approaches.

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

STREAM INTERVIEW

Nigel Chadwick, founder and CEO, Stream Technologies

Alan Tait, CTO, Stream Technologies

LoRa – and more After a number of years of relative stability – even inertia – the wireless connectivity part of the IoT value chain is bursting into life again. New technologies and standards, many based around Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) concepts have emerged; the ever-scarce radio spectrum is being sliced and diced in different ways; and many new entrants are appearing to offer devices, services and applications specifically for this terrain.

To get a better insight into some of these issues, IoT Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, recently sat down to speak with two senior representatives of Stream Technologies, developers of the award winning IoT-X IoT platform: Nigel Chadwick, the company’s founder and CEO and Alan Tait, CTO. IoT Now: Judging by the crowds and the buzz at last November’s LoRa Alliance meeting in Rotterdam, LPWA – at least in that particular technical incarnation – seems to be reaching a kind of critical mass. What’s your take on current – and future developments – in that space.

NC: We are impressed with the level of interest and adoption of LoRa – and some of the other recent developments like NB-IoT – that are giving us a richer set of wireless connectivity options to use in different situations. For a start, the imminent ending of GPRS coverage in some parts of the world is spurring engineers on to develop

alternatives such as LTE-M and, from the LPWA perspective, NB-IoT - both being part of the 3GPP landscape. LoRa is coming from a different heritage, though enhanced features like roaming and positioning are being added and there is interworking underway between this community and the 3GPP. As I’ll expand on a bit later, we’re showing our commitment to LoRa in a number of different ways and are keen supporters of the community and its potential.

These developments are especially interesting in the context that they place the last fifteen years or so that we’ve spent investing in our platform, our processes - and even business principles. Ten years ago, we were essentially an MVNO that specialised in M2M but fortunately identified even back then the need for the kind of connectivityagnostic platform now represented by our IoT-X – supported as well by the necessarily wide set of features and functions that today’s market demands. That prescience, flexibility and implicit openness has helped us differentiate Stream from other platform developers and vendors who envisaged a flatter, more two-dimensional connectivity and service delivery and management world than the one now knocking on our doors.

We were fortunate in being able to support that longer term vision through the fact that we ▼

But how are these emerging connectivity options and the subsequent choices that we will have to make going to affect the current status quo?

Many of the M2M and IoT solutions and strategies that now surround us have largely grown using those familiar flavours of GSM, from 2G to 4G, all supported and synchronised by the vital standardisation work of ETSI and the 3GPP.

We are impressed with the level of interest and adoption of LoRa – and some of the other recent developments like NB-IoT

IN ASSOCIATION WITH STREAM IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

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STREAM INTERVIEW

The result – behind the scenes - has been the creation of what’s effectively a tool kit for managing connectivity irrespective of whether it’s satellite, 2G, 3G, 4G, LPWA or even the newer forms of Bluetooth and WiFi now appearing. With each iteration, that tool kit – and the wider IoT-X environment – gains new features, most recently with addition of richer policy controls, packet loss monitoring and mitigation, plus other integral capabilities to ensure cost-effective scaling and growth. We’re also currently exploring how we and our customers can take advantage of developments in Software Defined Networking (SDN) to improve network throughput and efficiency.

That exploration aspect is also aided by the openness of IoT-X which we built in from the start. While going about its day to day work, supporting live customers and devices, we’re also able to use it as a test-bed to work with customers who themselves want to introduce new features, services or connectivity options to their own portfolios, but manage that innovation and rollout securely, safely and cost-effectively. In turn other adopters of our platform stand to benefit from these evolvements and iterations of IoT-X. IoT Now: LoRa already looks definitely set to increase the number of connected ‘things’ on the planet by a large factor – but that expansion is obviously going to resonate throughout all the other connected IT systems, business processes and organisational structures involved. What’s the impact here amongst customers going to be?

AT: In terms of feedback so far, there are probably two main areas. Firstly, companies are surprised at the ease of deployments and the associated activation, monitoring and billing processes. We work with a ‘light touch’ methodology, eliminating unnecessary or redundant touch points from the service interface and only expose the underlying complexity to end users in appropriate ways at appropriate operational or

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managerial levels. That brings an instant benefit for customers in terms of staff recruitment and training – a sometimes forgotten aspect of operational expense. This becomes particularly relevant as deployments of IoT solutions and connected end point volumes scale up.

The rider to that – and essentially the second area – is that it means the customer can focus on what they’re going to do with the data feeds coming via IoT-X into their own enterprise systems and, increasingly, into their own partners as well via shared value and delivery chains. The majority of decision makers and managers within any corporation have no interest in how the actual data arrives into their systems – they just want it delivered reliably, cleanly and usually in as real time a way as possible. In this context, they just want to see their IoT initiative as just another part of an IT project – not a standalone area that’s going to require heavy additional investment, specialist and expensive expertise and be a problem to support, maintain and change over the lifetime of its operation.

From this perspective, we’re the enablers and supporters of those analytics, decision support and business intelligence systems that hopefully add value and increase insight into a company’s operations, products and services to improve their competitiveness. There’s a growing thirst amongst companies of all shapes and sizes for this data – we’ve seen traffic loads grow by around a factor of ten over the last year or two alone and it shows no sign of abating.

One aspect of that complexity reduction process which we’ve recently introduced and which is already proving extremely popular involves our recent relationship with Morpho (Safran) that allows us to offer support for eSIMs. This is a recent 3GPP specification which allows provisioning of subscribers over the air (OTA). This is supported by a completely secure manufacturing and supply chain provided by the MorphoFlex subscription management solution, we can remotely provision or change local cellular connectivity for MNOs and customers anywhere in the world. The combination of Stream and Morpho creates an entirely new go to market strategy for MNOs looking to play in IoT. That potentially helps us, or other IoT-X adopters to have a truly global reach, and allows IoT-X to be – and also enable - a new breed of Super-VNO (Virtual Network Operator), which can help level the field for tier two

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remain in private ownership and tend to eschew (in contrast to many private equity-backed players) short-term tactical ‘wins’ in preference to longer term strategic success – I call it ‘strategic patience’. In practice, that’s meant that we’ve been able to anticipate and prepare for many of the shifts that have taken place across the M2M/IoT sector and which are reflected in the evolving demands of actual end customers.

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

and three operators, while simultaneously simplifying worldwide deployments for enterprises and major international brands.

well suited to with its good penetration characteristics.

IoT Now: Nigel – there was a flurry of announcements from Stream towards the end of last year that focused specifically on your work in the LoRa sector. Can you talk us through what they were and where you are now – and indeed, where you’re heading?

NC: Before doing that, I’d like to emphasise that while we believe that LoRa has a potentially huge role to play in extending connectivity, its success is going to be dependent on the quality and efficiency of the platforms that are used to manage that connectivity. As an industry sector that exists to serve and support other industry sectors – and indeed, I’d argue, entire societies – we have to be able to support the almost inevitably essential interworking with other communications mediums that will be required.

Barriers between different network types and technologies have been steadily eroding over the last decade or two, but there are still all sorts of minutia that must be addressed if crossboundary communication is going to work effectively, especially where issues like roaming, redundancy, positioning and service fall back are concerned. There’s a significant difference between drawing nice pictures of clouds overlapping on a white board and the often tricky engineering that involves data packets and protocols out in the real world.

Slightly later that month, we announced a similar partnership with Link Labs and their LoRaWAN Symphony product range, and with KERLINK, whose LoRa IoT Station is already being deployed across Europe. I think I’m right in saying that our IoT-X Now platform now supports all LoRaWAN compliant gateways and we’re watching the development and release of additional features very closely.

As far as our activity with LoRa is concerned, we made our first announcement back in August last year

Another announcement from late last year that’s also significant in a slightly different context concerns another demonstration of successful interworking – this time with LoRa and the Iridium low Earth orbit satellite mesh network.

There are numerous situations – smart cities, civil emergencies and natural disasters, missioncritical communications for the utilities and transport – where satellite backhaul can provide a vital alternative if terrestrial networks are unavailable for whatever reason. We’ve seen the impact of this recently from New Orleans to the Asian tsunami, where the absence of communications has severely hampered relief efforts. As LoRa-based systems become increasingly integrated with urban infrastructure and critical systems, it’s essential that we build survivability into them as well.

Finally – and much closer home to us as a company – there’s the LoRa testbed network that we’ve installed at our HQ in Glasgow. It currently covers around eight square miles of the city centre and, given Glasgow’s amazing industrial heritage role as a workshop of the British Empire, we feel there’s a nice resonance in introducing a truly 21st century technology platform to the city.

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As far as our activity with LoRa is concerned, we made our first announcement back in August last year – a joint project with MultiTech that meant that their LoRaWAN mDot products and devices and Conduit gateways would be pre-integrated with our IoT-X platform. One early project that we worked on together demonstrated the use of We’ve opened this up to a number of local these – plus an IBM Node-RED custom academic partners: the University of Glasgow, the application – to deliver a building automation University of Strathclyde and Glasgow application, an area which LoRa is particularly Caledonian•University.

Teams from these are hello@arkessa.com +44 1279 799270

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

arkessa.com

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STREAM INTERVIEW

positioning of IoT-X: ‘Stream’s IoT-X platform embodies a feature rich, extensible offering in the Connectivity Platform space. Whilst remaining agnostic towards connectivity technology type, Stream remains one of the only vendors of platforms that has fully embraced LoRa technology, including enabling connectivity management as well as LoRa WAN network server functionality. The company is committed to the provision of multi-technology, multi-vendor connectivity as homogenous as possible. It also has a rich partner ecosystem, including SIs. Stream occupies a unique positioning in the PaaS developer and vendor space’.

The report from Machina was an independent strategic report and highlighted 20 platform related vendors, out of which only three – including Stream – had a PaaS ‘play’ covering Connectivity Support as well as Connectivity

currently engaged on a number of LoRa projects, examining its potential in areas like smart transportation and smart campuses.

IoT Now: Alan – Stream Technologies are noted in a recent report by Machina Research entitled ‘IoT Platforms Best Practices’ which identifies Stream as ‘one of the most important software platform vendors’. Why this focus from Stream on innovating, developing and monetising new Platform as a Service (PaaS) based technologies?

AT: The report from Machina was an independent strategic report and highlighted 20 platform related vendors, out of which only three – including Stream – had a PaaS ‘play’ covering Connectivity Support as well as Connectivity. In recent years we have evolved into a company with a wide range of specialist skills and experience, which combine to result in a substantially differentiated technical, operational and commercial capability.

In particular, this expertise comprises telco and wireless connectivity, software development, backhaul infrastructure design, and data transiting/routing. Doing all the development work in-house means we are constantly creating and refining functionality and all we have learned in cellular is naturally extended and adapted to satellite and latterly LPWAN. Stream’s consistent agnostic approach was particularly suited to integrating LoRa connectivity management within IoT-X as well as LoRa WAN network manager capability. We foster technical creativity throughout our company and encourage people to challenge the status quo and legacy ways of doing things. These traits, when blended with our agnosticism and innovation, result in Stream’s unique DNA and company culture.

I think the quote by Jim Morrish of Machina Research pretty well sums up the current

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IoT Now: It sounds like IoT-X is certainly attracting a lot of attention across the IoT sector presently. Can you provide some insight into where the interest is coming from and how you see IoT-X being leveraged by different organisations across the globe?

NC: It’s fascinating to see where interest is derived from for the platform; primarily because it provides a unique insight into how different types of companies are evolving, how they are ensuring future proofing (in terms of assurance over delivery and management of connectivity) and how they are evolving go-to-market partnerships. Add to this the fact that we are seeing new entrants into the LPWA and connectivity space – both new starts, as well as established global players – who are seeing a huge opportunity in enabling and monetising IoT wireless networks which in turn are going to support the deployment of billions of connected devices and related solution sets over the next decade. MNOs across the globe are exploring and evaluating which LPWAN direction to take and IoT-X, due to its low risk-cost and agnostic attributes, holds strong appeal to these operators.

Furthermore, such operators also stand to gain from eSIM and other features inherent within IoTX should they so choose. There are also existing privately owned LPWANs which are seeking to drive more revenue through opening up such networks for third party use; IoT-X effectively manages subscribers on the network and associated tariff billing. Then there are large scale global organisations that are seeking to support their often multi-national enterprise clients seeking a LPWAN – which have the real estate, asset values, and business models where establishment of their own network can make substantial impact on bottom lines. These global organisations include a mix of multi-national SIs, equipment and module manufacturers, component OEMs and distributors, as well as other organisation types that would not until now have been associated with IoT. This really brings me right back to my earlier point regarding IoT-X becoming pivotal in enabling Super VNOs.

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

ANALYST REPORT

After its first year on the IoT scene, what’s ahead for LoRa? LoRa is an LPWA technology that had been rather gradually gaining relevance since the beginning of the decade, but 2015 was the year when it truly became a top-ofmind subject in the IoT space. That is at least if the inquiries from Machina Research’s clients are used as a yardstick - writes Machina Research’s principal analyst Aapo Markkanen - with “What should I think about LoRa?” and its variations ranking high in our thematic Top 5 over the latter half of the year.

LoRa and LoRaWAN in a nutshell Let’s start with a reminder of what we’re actually talking about. LoRa (Long Range) is a modulation format that is based on the chirp spreadspectrum (CSS) technique, in which a lowbandwidth signal is “spread” over a bandwidth that is much wider than the transmitted signal content would require as the technical minimum.

The format resides on the network’s physical layer (PHY) and is agnostic in terms of network

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

topology – in other words, it can do both star and mesh architectures. As a PHY technology, LoRa is proprietary to Semtech Corporation, which obtained it by acquiring Cycleo, a French chipset start-up, in 2012.

LoRaWAN, in the meantime, is a specification that resides on the MAC layer and serves as a networking protocol for LoRa-based networks.

The specification has been developed specifically for the LoRa PHY, and it is freely available as an open standard to interested developers.

LoRaWAN is managed and promoted by the LoRa Alliance, a not-for-profit association that was launched in Q1 2015, with an underlying goal of making the standard competitively neutral for the involved partners and advancing collaboration between them. ▼

Most of this mindshare growth can be attributed to the LoRa Alliance, which was launched at Mobile World Congress in March 2015, and its ongoing work on the LoRaWAN protocol. With another MWC just around the corner, this feels like the right time to take stock of LoRa and think about where it may be heading.

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ANALYST REPORT

The timing for deploying these public and nationwide LoRaWAN networks is intriguing, considering the LPWA standardisation work that is taking place at 3GPP Aapo Markkanen, Machina Research

Private or public, licensed or unlicensed?

Originally, LoRa was used exclusively to roll out private, campus-style infrastructure, but the creation of LoRaWAN has seen the focus shifting visibly towards the public network model. In particular, a number of MNOs in Western Europe – including Bouygues, KPN, Orange, Proximus, and Swisscom – have bought into LoRa/LoRaWAN as their first LPWA technology. Outside of Europe, FastNet (Telkom) in South Africa, SK Telecom in South Korea, and Tata Communications in India have pursued a similar strategy. Of the greenfieldstyle, non-MNO providers the Russian-based Lace as well as US-based Senet and M2M Spectrum Networks have also chosen the public model.

The timing for deploying these public and nationwide LoRaWAN networks is intriguing, considering the LPWA standardisation work that is taking place at 3GPP. Had the process proven more straightforward than it actually has, and led to a standard that could have conceivably seen large-scale commercial roll-outs already in 2016, then that might have left too little strategic room for LoRa to take off as a publicnetwork proposition. However, as the upcoming 3GPP standards may not be available (beyond trials) until late-2017, there is now a realistic window of opportunity for alternatives that allow MNOs to offer LPWA connectivity and solutions without delays. Against this backdrop, the current positioning of LoRa may well make sense.

The MNOs that have introduced LoRaWAN services have done so by utilising the unlicensed ISM bands, but there is also the option of running the technology over licensed spectrum. Amongst the experts that Machina Research has interviewed so far, opinions have been divided when it comes to the viability of this – with some executives regarding the licensed-spectrum model as the way forward, and some others viewing the underlying CSS technique as fundamentally too spectrum-inefficient for such a scarce resource. As a strategic question, it will eventually have farreaching consequences for the LPWA market as a whole. The licensed version of LoRa could possibly serve as an outright substitute for cellular-based technologies, while its unlicensed flavour is likelier to prove a complementary offering that will be ultimately used in parallel with cellular-based LPWA networks.

Three big questions for the LoRa ecosystem in 2016 The release of LoRaWAN and the creation of the LoRa Alliance put LoRa at the forefront of IoT connectivity in 2015. The next 12 months will tell us a lot about whether the early interest and excitement around the technology can make a more sustained and material impact on the connected world. In this context, the following three points will be particularly decisive: • Can LoRa get enough buy-in from third-party chipmakers? This year, LoRa’s greatest test is how much investment it will attract from chipset suppliers other than

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Semtech. Without additional suppliers on the PHY level, device makers and enterprises that are evaluating the technology proposition are, overall, likely to decide against it as too risky. On this front, the recent signs are fairly positive, with STMicroelectronics having announced in December that it will start producing LoRa-based SoCs. Microchip has also indicated it plans to do the same.

• Will the regulatory environment remain favourable?

LoRa’s current momentum is owed in large part to the relatively permissive regulatory environment around the use of unlicensed spectrum, which has allowed operators of both public and private networks to act fast, and move swiftly from networks’ evaluation to their deployment.

However, the long-term outlook for providing LPWA connectivity over unlicensed frequencies is currently anything but certain – as we discussed in an article last month on the IoT Now website.

• Can the LoRa ecosystem deliver interoperability? The main reason why MNOs have shown interest in LoRa is that LoRaWAN, as an open protocol, gives providers a high degree of control and flexibility when rolling out the network and integrating it with the existing backend systems. The flipside is that enabling device roaming across separate LoRaWAN networks is likely to prove challenging due to differing implementations. Dealing with these problems will be a high priority for the LoRa Alliance, given that interoperability is critical for anyone who plans to supply or use LoRa-based devices. The Alliance already has a certification program to ensure that end devices will comply with the specification, but that’s only one part of the interoperability effort. A lot of heavy lifting remains, especially on the network level.

As a conclusion, LoRa’s breakout year was undeniably successful, but the companies betting on it still have their work cut out for them. The next appropriate checkpoint for their progress will be LoRaWAN’s next full iteration, scheduled for mid-2016 or so. Expected to address key aspects such as network roaming and geo-location - a potential killer feature its reception will, to a large extent, show whether the LoRa camp will be next gearing up – or down.

Aapo Markkanen is a principal analyst at Machina Research, where he focuses on access technologies and the role they will play in the evolution of M2M and IoT connectivity. He has a particular research interest in Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks and competing short-range alternatives. In addition, Aapo contributes to Machina Research’s coverage on other emergent IoT topics, advising vendors, service providers, and end users on a variety of market and technology issues that will shape tomorrow’s connected enterprise. Aapo holds BSc and MSc degrees in management studies from the University of Tampere, Finland.

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

PERSPECTIVES

LoRa UPDATE As a professional observer of the industry ‘formerly known as telecoms’ for many years, it’s always fascinating watching the birth of a new technology, writes Alun Lewis, editor of IoT Now. After a few years – and especially after a few decades – you start to learn to trust your nose when it begins to sense the beginning of something potentially big.

Equally, you also learn to trust the prickling hairs on the back of your neck as a warning that a technology is being over-hyped and over-promoted and that the predicted ‘revolution/evolution’ is going to end in tears for all concerned.

Against this backdrop of sometimes bitter experience, it was a delight to attend the LoRa Alliance event held in Rotterdam in November last year. There was a tangible buzz and simmering, latent energy there – the like of which this writer probably hasn’t felt since first attending MWC’s predecessor, the GSM Congress, back in the now distant days of 1993.

With entrants to the Lora world increasing almost daily, it’s already starting to become difficult to keep track of all the different initiatives and industry players out there – some global, some intensely local. IoT Now approached a number of companies to get their take on what’s happening from their own individual perspectives – read on to see the results…

Rapid growth, expansion and real world deployments

“Some key milestones include 13 announced nationwide public network deployments in various countries, two successful all-members meetings in Paris and Rotterdam, implementation of a LoRaWAN certification program, and over 4,000 specification downloads. The LoRa Alliance ecosystem, along with its STMicroelectronics and Microchip licensing partners, will give LoRa the edge when it comes

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

to scaling deployed networks quickly via market ready solutions, certified modules and sensors, and support through multiple channels.

“We believe the best way to keep up with this is a robust, standardised ecosystem. By promoting collaboration throughout a complex value chain, we can ensure quick time to market for end-user applications, more incentives for companies to launch LPWANs, and guaranteed connectivity between LoRaWAN-based networks and applications.

“Bouygues Telecom (France), Fastnet (South Africa), KPN (The Netherlands), The Lace Company (Russia), Orange (France), Proximus (Belgium and Luxembourg), Senet (North America), SK Telecom (South Korea), Swisscom (Switzerland), Tata Communications (India), and others have launched public networks capable of supporting any application that follows the LoRaWAN specification, creating endless opportunities for companies to implement IoT solutions.” ▼

Perhaps we should start with a view from Semtech, effectively the founders of the LoRa world. Hardy Schmidbauer, director of Wireless for Semtech’s Wireless, Sensing & Timing Product Group, sets the stage: “Semtech officially launched the LoRa® Alliance with leading telecom companies and IoT solution providers at MWC 2015 to create an ecosystem of partners committed to standardising and scaling IoT. In just one year, the Alliance has grown to include over 200 companies from all over the world, and many have already deployed networks and solutions based on the LoRaWAN™ specification.

In just one year, the Alliance has grown to include over 200 companies from all over the world

Hardy Schmidbauer, Semtech

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PERSPECTIVES

Schmidbauer explains: “LoRaWAN networks operate in unlicensed ISM bands worldwide and are capable of communicating up to 15-30 miles in rural or unobstructed environments and up to 1-2 miles in dense urban and indoor areas. In addition, LoRaWAN has a unique adaptive data rate feature to ensure network scalability, multilevel encryption for secure communication, and long battery life. These features, along with our strong global partnerships within the LoRa Alliance, have attracted many companies from a variety of industries.

“To accommodate the demand for information about LoRa, we continue to host webinars and inperson boot camp classes in North America, Asia and Europe, which have already attracted over 1,000 people. Both established companies and startups are transitioning toward connected technologies, and we look forward to using our standardised network of LoRa users to improve supply chain and building management, water conservation, air pollution controls, volcano and earthquake surveillance, healthcare, public safety, and more.”

Network rollouts and technology enhancements

Olivier Hersent, Actility

For Olivier Hersent, CEO and CTO at Actility, a company very active in this space with a number of networks already deployed for different operator customers, “2015 has been a major year for LoRaWAN. In 2015, the first country-sized LoRaWAN networks were rolled-out with the support of Actility’s core solutions: Proximus in Belgium was the first country to roll-out a LoRaWAN network, shortly followed by KPN in Netherlands, and Swisscom in a region in Switzerland, offering disruptive use cases such as smart parking, asset tracking or facilities management.

Hersent adds: “2016 is going to be even more exciting. New major LoRaWAN projects are announced in France - by Orange and Bouygues - but also across North America, Australia, China and India. Mass deployments of public networks will drive the device ecosystem to develop new products and services. At the same time, the LoRaWAN standard continues to evolve in 2016, adding new features such as support for roaming between operators, GPS-free location capabilities and multicasting.”

Secure - and ubiquitous - coverage

Manfred Kube, Gemalto

According to Manfred Kube, head of M2M segment, Gemalto, “The mobile internet as we know it was not built for IoT and this is where LoRa comes in - a network designed with security experts to ensure the reliability and safety of the devices and systems that are used.

Some of its specifications include a network authentication scheme leveraging two session keys: NwkSKey to secure the radio part, and AppSKey to secure the data all the way to the application server. This, by its nature, ensures the protection of the data all the way to the server consuming the data, and allows LoRa network operators to ensure that customer data is not accessible when they use a Joint Server or Trusted Third Party.

“The great building penetration of LoRa allows operators to provide location services both indoor and outdoor – this is imperative for the numerous smart city projects that are being commissioned across the globe. Additionally, unlike the more obvious examples of IoT such as your TV, iPod and iPad all communicating with each other, LoRa has a much more practical function, such as facilitating water and gas metering at a lower cost with a lower energy usage. Although LoRa is not a one-size-fits-all technology, it certainly complements the existing available 3GPP technologies for specific M2M and IoT use cases.”

A LoRa operator’s perspective from the USA

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“That’s when we decided to develop our own LPWA network, potentially facilitating around 3040% cost savings. We believe that LoRa is the best option, with dozens of new M2M applications which also need the same low power, low cost, WAN network to scale. So Senet was born as a public NaaS (Network as a Service) and IoT platform provider. Today we have well over 110,000 square miles of LoRa network coverage in the US which is expanding weekly and are working with over 50 developers to turn their ideas for supply chain delivery and pickup efficiency gains, predictive maintenance, and government compliance into a reality using Senet. 2015 was the year we began to build out the US LoRa network - we will double or triple that coverage in 2016. ▼

George Dannecker, Senet

Senet in the USA uses LoRa to provide low cost, low power, long range connectivity and IoT platform services for businesses across all industries. According to George Dannecker, CEO, Senet,” We started a company called EnerTrac in 2009 to solve a problem that just wasn’t scalable with either WiFi or cellular-based sensor networks. In the home heating fuel industry here, fuel dealers had no way of knowing exactly what was in their customers’ tanks - they only could guess, so leaving them with very inefficient delivery systems. To monitor fuel levels, they would have had to rely on either using their customers’ WiFi networks to transmit this sensor data to their offices - not very dependable - or use the cellphone network, which was both too expensive and too battery hungry.

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

Crowdsourcing LoRa for a community’s public good - rhinos and boat owners included An alternative, ground-up approach to network rollouts is being taken by The Things Network.

Wienke Giezeman, CEO, explains: “We are on a mission to provide this technology globally through crowdsourcing. We managed to launch a network covering Amsterdam in six weeks. Eight weeks later, Sao Paulo, Boston, Buenos Aires, Kochi and Sydney were doing the same. We’re enabling citizens to build a carrier grade network from the bottom up as we need more doing and less talking and have to escape the IoT hype phase.

“In October 2015, we started spreading our network through a Kickstarter campaign. We crowdsourced the production costs for 1000 LoRaWAN gateways which will ship in July 2016 a moment when in one day we should expand our network 100 times. The strength of our initiative is in our open and decentralised approach. Because we open source all our knowledge and our IP, it is very easy to copy and to expand globally and the technology’s allowed in almost every country in the world.

“We’ve already got some excellent use cases.

Amsterdam has a lot of boats, but unfortunately also quite a lot of rain. It’s not uncommon for

boats to fill up with water and start to sink, so a water detector was developed that recognises if your boat is filling up with water and sends you an SMS. On a return SMS of “clear my boat”, a service will actually also visit to remove the water.

In Zimbabwe, a Rhino Finder application has been developed. Anti-Poaching Units can get information about dangers in real time and so can coordinate much better and get teams on site quickly enough to actually stop the poachers. This system populates an interactive online map that antipoaching units can visualise incidents, patterns of poaching and coordinate and respond to incidents efficiently.

In October 2015, we started spreading our network through a Kickstarter campaign

Danish Smart Grids prepare for LoRa In a joint effort, Thorsten Kramp, Alexandru Caracas and Michael Kuyper of IBM Research’s labs in Zurich describe one application use case and why the LoRaWAN technology is a prime match for this type of application: “Starting in 2016 for a duration of three years, the Danish national Energy Technological Development and Demonstration Program (EUDP) is funding the EcoGrid 2.0 project with the objective of building on and improving the results from previous EU-funded projects. One of the new goals is to significantly reduce the peak load for the electricity grid by using households as buffers in terms of heat capacity, creating flexibility in terms of electricity supply and demand. To achieve this, households will be equipped with sensors and actuators that control the heating system and can automatically respond to flexibility requests in real time. The experience of previous smart grid projects has shown that existing IoT technologies using PANtype communication are cumbersome to install and configure, and have limited reliability.

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

“To specifically address these issues, the EcoGrid 2.0 project will deploy a LoRaWAN network with hundreds of devices using the IBM Long Range Signal and Control (LRSC) Network as a Service (NaaS) infrastructure to monitor and control the heat pumps in users’ homes throughout the Danish island of Bornholm. As part of this, the EcoGrid 2.0 project will develop custom household equipment using LoRaWAN communication which gives multiple benefits: Firstly, over-the-air activation and configuration. Secondly, excellent range and indoor penetration, which covers larger areas with a reduced set of gateways. Thirdly, the ability to have commands sent to devices for control operations. The information collected by the household equipment includes heat pump activity in terms of power consumption, in- and out-flow temperatures, as well as the corresponding indoor room temperature.

Lego model of Danish Island Bornholm “Control options include the ability to stop and throttle the heat pump, or allow it to function based on performance models, learned over time, so improving the efficiency of the overall control system.”

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INTERVIEW

LoRa – a philosophy of openness?

Throughout human history, there’s been a permanent tension between open and closed views of the world, influencing everything from religion and politics to international trade.

The technology sector has not escaped this seemingly eternal struggle and, in fact, some of the bitterest infighting has taken place within our communities over the last few years.

Fortunately, we’ve given up on burning heretics, at least in the non-digital flesh.

Geoff Mulligan, LoRa Alliance chairman

The comparatively recent arrival of new Low Power Wide Area network (LPWA) radio technologies in the IoT space seems to be raising at least a few aspects of this debate again. On one hand are the cellular standards, rigorously managed by ETSI, the 3GPP and others, such as LTE-M and NB-IoT. On the other are the newer entrants with different pedigrees – like LoRa. While work is underway to synchronise and interlink some aspects of these two world, IoT Now thought it would be interesting to get a take on some of the actual philosophies underpinning a now thriving LoRa community which, in some ways, is challenging the status quo.

Alun Lewis, editor of IoT Now, recently spoke with Geoff Mulligan, chairman of the LoRa Alliance and a well-known industry figure.

The LoRa Alliance isn’t about proscribing or prescribing – as long as the technologies involved meet the necessary standards to interwork with the wider ecosystem and behave within the allocated radio spectrum

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IoT Now: Geoff, your personal history seems to have been intertwined with various aspects of open standards since their very earliest days.

Can you give us a quick insight into this please?

GM: I have been accused at times, though not in a strictly unpleasant way, of being an open standards bigot – an accusation I’m perfectly happy to agree with! In response, I always ask the rhetorical question: where would we be now – as individuals, as companies and indeed as a civilisation – if TCP/IP and HTML had been patented?

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved in some of the key developments of the last few decades that have helped create the infinitely interconnected universe that now surrounds us.

Very early on, during my time in the United States Air Force, I worked on ARPANET – the conceptual predecessor of the Internet.

Subsequently, I was very involved at the start of the IPv6 development, recognising early on the potential address exhaust problems implicit in connecting everything. More recently, I was on the founding board of the Zigbee Alliance but, with my focus on openness, I was also co-chair of the 6LoWPAN Working Group. Vint Cerf, making a play on his own unofficial title, did once dub me ‘the father of the embedded internet’. In 2008, I also worked with others to launch the Internet Protocol for Smart Objects (IPSO) Alliance which is looking at ways to standardise making objects addressable and identifiable and, more recently in 2013 and 2014, worked at the White House on the IoT and 3D printing.

Then, around a year ago, as the LoRa Alliance was starting to take off, I was invited to participate as Chairman – an invitation I was honoured to accept.

IoT Now: So what’s the plan for LoRa – if that’s not an oxymoron in an ‘open’ environment?

GM: Personally, I love the term ‘permissionless innovation’, meaning that we need to be able to innovate without requiring the permission of the network operator or third party and where everything that can connect, should connect – obviously with certain essential security and identity protection mechanisms. It’s ironic at the time of MWC to remember how intensely mobile operators and others each tried to build their own ‘walled gardens’ back in the late 1990s – a strategy that severely impacted their ability to innovate.

The LoRa Alliance isn’t about proscribing or prescribing – as long as the technologies involved meet the necessary standards to interwork with the wider ecosystem and behave within the allocated radio spectrum. We’re not here to try and impose some artificial business or operating model for members or the ecosystem, be they existing public network operators; companies who want to set up their own networks for their own use or to sell spare capacity to third parties; or the very diverse community of application developers and device, infrastructure and software vendors that’s now gathering around the LoRa concept.

We’ve had a number of enquiries from some businesses recently who have read about the basics of the technology and see potential benefits to being able to track and monitor their products or assets. Their first reaction is disbelief when we tell them that they don’t have to go to an existing network operator or buy spectrum and that they can not only build and run their own network, but that once it’s installed, they can also sell spare capacity to other companies in the same area.

The LoRa Alliance has essentially created a petri dish that’ll hopefully be a fertile incubator for the next stage of IoT innovation and imagination. The first spores have already taken root and it’s going to be fascinating to see what crawls, springs or strides forth from that environment over the coming months and years.

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

INTERVIEW

MultiTech – helping grow the LoRa ecosystem MultiTech Systems, a founding member of the LoRa Alliance - and which will be exhibiting on the Alliance stand at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona - has been active in advancing a number of aspects of the LoRa technology, as well as developing new applications and business models. IoT Now contributor, Peter Dykes, spoke to Daniel Quant, VP Product Management & Strategic Marketing, at MultiTech to find out more about the company’s activities in the LoRa space.

IoT Now: How is MultiTech engaged with the LoRa Alliance?

DQ: Deeply. We have Dave Smith, MultiTech’s Senior VP, Engineering and Innovation, serving as vice-chair of the Certification Group; Derek Wallace, Director of Product Management is a member of the Marketing Work Group; while Mike Lynch, QA team manager, is a member of the Certification Work Group. I’m actively participating within the Strategy Group, more specifically the LoRaWAN Roadmap definition, where I’m able to leverage my experience in portfolio management; and the Application Protocol task group, which is addressing the integration of existing application protocols over LoRaWAN. I also act as a liaison between the Strategy Group and the Certification Group. I can use MultiTech’s position in the market, our skills set and our knowledge to help move the Alliance in what we collectively feel is the most effective direction.

IoT Now: What other Alliance work has Multitech been involved in?

▼

DQ: We participated heavily in the development of the LoRaWAN specifications version 1.0 through to 1.1 - soon to be published - and we are already working on content for version 1.2. We have also co-authored the channel plans for Australia, Brazil, Brunei, South Korea, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Singapore. In addition, MultiTech has worked on MAC proposals in various areas, contributed to the development of the Join Request/Accept protocol, end device International roaming support, and we have defined priorities for industry application protocols that can run over LoRaWAN to address key verticals such as lighting and industrial control.

Daniel Quant, VP Product Management & Strategic Marketing, MultiTech

IN ASSOCIATION WITH MULTITECH IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

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INTERVIEW

Another contribution we’ve made to the Alliance’s work is within Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) -- a scheme designed to improve efficiency and achieve a better return on investment for enterprises and operators alike, who can efficiently accommodate more LoRaWAN end points in a geographic region by spreading out what are known as spreading factors, which dictate the data rate versus the protection on each one of those points. On the edge, where Received Signal Strength is poor, there’s lots of protection and not so much payload, but importantly there is a measure of connectivity even in harsh industrial environments or an underground smart car park. Very close to the gateway, on the other hand, there is lots of payload and not very much protection, which offers the ability to go on and off channel very quickly, meaning the next device can connect and therefore end point density is maximised with less infrastructure.

IoT Now: Compared to other Alliance members who are, for example, producing hardware, how would you differentiate MultiTech from some of the other players in the ecosystem?

DQ: We are in a good position as MultiTech is a Contributor Member, along with 20 or so other companies such as MicroChip. This means we can contribute to the overall effort and create this journey that LoRaWAN and the LoRa Alliance is on. We are limited in some ways, such as we are unable to invent a new working group and we don’t sit on the board of directors as Sponsor members can and do. However, critically, we have a vote and are able to participate in all and any working or task groups, which provides us a front row seat in the evolution of LoRaWAN and the ability to be one of the first to market with LoRaWAN module and gateway enhancements.

IoT Now: How do you see LoRa deployments going forward? Do you think there is much of a market for private networks?

DQ: The LoRa Alliance has defined a standard that serves well both the public and private deployment models. Of course, public deployment is very appealing. Imagine lighting up the whole of North America, Europe and Asia with LoRa public networks.

This would have a huge impact on the number of LoRaWAN end product deployments out there and it would be like the mobile phone boom of the 1990s.

▼

In the enterprise space, LoRa has a really great story.

It’s deployed on ISM band technology, you don’t need to buy any costly licenses, and there aren’t nearly as many different ISM bands around the world as LTE

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IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

In the enterprise space, LoRa has a really great story. It’s deployed on ISM band technology, you don’t need to buy any costly licenses, and there aren’t nearly as many different ISM bands around the world as LTE, so it can be deployed anywhere where an enterprise, operator or its customers do business, but without the bureaucracy of who owns the spectrum, having to establish roaming partners and so forth.

It’s also possible to deploy LoRa in a way which gives very secure control of private data moving around in the enterprise. A lot of the large multinational companies really like the sound of that. For example, an airline could deploy a network in every airport hub around the world that it serves, which could be managed internally by the airline’s own IT department. There would be no requirement for roaming partners, nor would there be any intermediaries between the airline and its data. Such a network could be used for things like baggage, crew and aircraft tracking and would offer a degree of security and control of data that may not be available using a public network.

Shipping companies are a good example of a possible hybrid network scenario. They can have a completely private LoRa deployment in their home port which monitors shipping containers, the location of tugboats, environmental pollution and a host of other metrics. The questions are, why would such companies want to pay a subscription every month for every one of those assets when most assets don’t move out of the port area, and why would they want to risk that

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

data being accessed from outside of a network that is beyond their control? The fact is that while a shipping company could deploy private LoRa networks into its larger ports, it would be more economical in the smaller ports to roam onto a public network. This would still retain a degree of asset tracking, but without compromising the data that would be coming from the more important locations. The ability to operate this hybrid model is also very attractive to the oil and gas industries which similarly need to protect data from their drilling installation.

IoT Now: You mentioned ISM bands earlier. Are they really that similar around the world or are there different restrictions on usage from country to country?

We have a very well-defined strategy for how we are going to bring further security to our products, which include LoRaWAN mDot modules

DQ: There are differences for sure, and that’s why we are involved in the process of defining LoRaWAN channel plans. While every country has its own ISM band, overall, ISM globally is not as fractured as cellular licensed spectrum as there are only four or five major ISM bands around the world which cover most countries.

The European Union has an 868MHz and a 433MHz ISM band. The LoRa Alliance has been more focussed around 868MHz, however in America it’s in the 915MHz range. This is a bigger band and the channel sharing restrictions are completely different and so we need channel plans to address ways of implementing LoRa deployments in different countries, knowing that in some places, you can’t be on channel all the time and once you’re off channel you can’t get back on again if you’ve been using it in certain situations. Essentially, the channel plan is about how the edge interacts with the gateway in accordance with all these rules imposed by the local country or region. Every country has its own set of rules and while a small number have very few rules, some countries, such as Japan, are very restrictive in the ways the ISM band can be used and so defining the channel plan is not an easy task. Until the channel plan is defined however, you can’t deploy LoRaWAN because, by definition, LoRaWAN is the specification of how you deploy LoRa in those given geographical markets, and as I mentioned earlier, MultiTech has done an enormous amount of work to define those channel plans. ▼

While we are supporting a lot of operators who are deploying nationwide networks, private deployments are an area that, perhaps due to the nature of the transformational impact LoRaWAN will have on enterprises and OEMs and the competitive advantage it will bring to their industry, is less talked about currently. This is where LoRa has a competitive advantage over the cellular licensed band technologies that will outlast any war over who will win the battle in the public LPWAN deployment arena. A battle that in my opinion both licensed and unlicensed technologies will win due to the broad nature of use cases to be connected.

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INTERVIEW

Bob – the LoRa-connected dummy construction worker with a helmet which has an in-built accelerometer that measures the force and direction of an impact, sending this formatted data using MultiTech’s LoRaWAN-ready mDot and Conduit gateway to IBM Bluemix. This creates an end-to-end IoT health and safety application for insurance compliance, issuing alerts for any potentially serious injuries. Attendees at MWC will be invited to hit Bob around the head as hard as they can with a baseball bat!

MultiTech has in fact gone a step further and implemented an approach that uses a secure element

IoT Now: Security is a very important issue for potential and existing LoRa users. What is MultiTech doing in that area?

DQ: We have a very well-defined strategy for how we are going to bring further security to our products, which include LoRaWAN mDot modules. Indeed, we are working with one of the big security companies in order to achieve just that. At present, the LoRa Alliance uses AES128 and key for both the network and application which is sufficient for a number of use cases. The LoRa Alliance has issued a call for papers from security firms and experts out there in order to consult experts further. Of course, MultiTech backs that because we believe it is vital to listen to what the professionals in this area are saying because we know this is an important issue, particularly for enterprises. MultiTech has in fact gone a step further and implemented an approach that uses a secure element. We’ll probably reveal more details in Q2, but suffice to say we are taking a leadership position. I think therefore that we’re adding a lot of value to the direction in which LoRaWAN is going to be moving.

IoT Now: What will MultiTech be doing at MWC this year?

DQ: Our main demo will feature Bob, who is a life-sized manikin construction worker. He wears a helmet which has an in-built accelerometer that measures the force and direction of an impact and sends this formatted data using our LoRaWAN-ready mDot and Conduit gateway to IBM Bluemix. In concert with IBM’s work on IoT analytics and a dashboard, we have developed an end-to-end IoT health and safety application for insurance compliance, to provide a safer working

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environment and to be alerted to any injuries occurring in the workforce. Attendees will be invited to hit Bob around the head as hard as they can with a baseball bat and generate the kind of analytics in the cloud that would warn an employer that an injury has occurred. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also a very serious and focussed demo which shows how sensor harvesting and data insight, no matter what vertical or use case, can be easily achieved over long distances using LoRaWAN and cloud-based analytics today.

MultiTech also will have a number of other engaging IoT demonstrations on partner and customer stands, so please watch this space!

IoT Now: What’s your view of market development in terms of players and products.

Will it be like any other emerging technology?

Is LoRa at a critical point and about to take off or is there still a lot of work to do?

DQ: We are definitely at a turning point in 2016.

The LoRa Alliance has been in existence for a year or so now, the LoRaWAN standard has now moved to version 1.0.1, with version 1.1 by the end of 1Q16 and 1.2 scheduled for later in the year.

This enhancement phase is well under way now in order to add a number of different features such as roaming and geolocation. Operators have begun commercial deployments. LoRaWAN is real, it is here today, and it has a lengthy head start on licensed cellular technologies that are unlikely to be deployed for some years yet. This is the year to take those public and private LoRa deployments and move ahead, waiting years is not an option in a world where realising efficiency and the overwhelming need to remain competitive is being driven from connecting almost everything, even if it is only a few bytes at a time!

IoT Now LoRa SUPPLEMENT - February / March 2016

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