Great thought process. Largely, the IOT ecosystem is the inter-connected scheme of small devices, sensors, gateways, cloud, web and mobile devices. The industry has spent almost two decades maturing the cloud, web and mobility. Now, it is time to identify the challenges that industry will face when billions of IOT devices are deployed. I agree, based on first hand experience, that it is relatively easy to prototype or even deploy a small set of POCs, but deploying, managing, and scaling a large number of these headless, resource constrained, low powered devices, while keeping the cost low, present an entirely different set of challenges.

I would also emphasize that for IOT devices, security should never be an after thought. Just imagine the attack surface from a cyber security point of view. Keeping the IOT ecosystem secure yet simple to operate should happen from the get go so that it remains relevant for the end users. This will require new technologies and policies.

I would go out on limb to say that DIY and KickStarters of the world have pushed the envelope and brought the experience to the forefront for early adopters and experimenters to get a feel of the future potential, but yes that experience ends at the prototype and POC levels. Making it a scalable product and then a viable business is an altogether different ball game.

The silver lining is that technology is lending itself to make the device and user management possible, but definitely more work needs to be done. I have had a few successes and the likes of Cisco can bring the deployment scale to streamline the bottlenecks.

I’m on the IOT2020 party bus. Cheers.