What are IoT Consulting Services, and Why Do You Need Them?
Data gathered by IoT (Internet of Things) devices and sensors is invaluable. However, many businesses do not perceive the value of IoT for their operations and the potential of IoT consulting services in improving the ROI of their IoT projects. Such initiatives can reduce costs, make processes better, and present valuable ideas. Businesses can get help from IoT consultants to unlock this potential and be guided along the way.
IDC expects the number of IoT device installations to skyrocket to over 41 billion by 2025, tripling what was recorded in 2013. Similarly, worldwide IoT-associated expenditure is projected to reach about £1.6 trillion by 2025.
This notwithstanding, most companies fear to venture into IoT because of its complexity. The IoT initiatives incorporate interplay between various technical aspects like devices, connectivity, data platforms, and applications. It is that complexity where IoT consultants become invaluable.
What do you understand by IoT consulting?
One of the critical roles played by IoT consultants is assisting businesses to understand IoT. They counsel and organize cost reduction, process improvement, and product and service enhancement systems via IoT. Aside from that, some IoT consulting service companies offer development services for IoT solutions. In addition, IoT consulting services provide vital strategic guidance and technical competence that ensure the development of appropriate IoT solutions specific to the needs of a business. Learn more about how IoT consultants can help you in your journey to IoT success by getting the fundamentals right.
The Importance of IoT Consulting in the Current Market
The consulting services for IoT have become crucial for several reasons:
- Shortage of IoT Talent: IoT is highly dynamic, and very few qualified personnel are available in the market. However, hiring an in-house IoT team is costly due to their high wages. For instance, an average of $125,000 per annum for an IoT developer in the USA.
- Cost-Effective Expertise: IoT consulting service companies that cannot afford to establish an internal IoT team but want to create IoT devices. The consulting services for IoT provide affordable use of knowledge and capabilities.
- Strategic Guidance: Most firms might not have the internal capacity to create an overarching IoT strategy. IoT Consultants provide direction for developing the best IoT strategies designed to meet specific business objectives.
- Market Insights: IoT consultants can help companies understand the go-to-market strategy in the IoT market and recommend suitable products and solutions to drive through one’s roadmap with some certainty.
In this regard, consulting services for IoT serve as a link between companies’ operations and enable them to exploit benefits associated with the IoT technology since there is talent scarcity and a bottleneck in learning the technology.
As the years go by, more IoT consulting service companies are willing to initiate IoT projects. According to recent data from IoT Analytics, there has been a 15% increase in IoT adoption in different sectors between 2021 and 2022.
The recent trend is supported by Gartner’s prediction, whereby over 50% of business processes will add an IoT element by 2023.
Suggested Reading: Common IoT Integration Challenges Businesses Face
Several key factors are fueling this trend:
- Data-Driven Decisions: IoT data is sensor-rich, furnishing real-time information to process operations and enable better business analytics.
- Cost Savings: It is possible to reduce costs significantly using IoT as it enhances the utilization of assets, cuts downtime, and automates manual processes. McKinsey puts the potential annual economic impact of IoT adoption at $11.1 trillion by 2025.
- New Business Models: M2ME: Pay Pal’s beacon of innovation IoT opening doors to innovative business models and revenue streams: From smart product features to usage-based pricing models.
- Health, Safety, and Compliance: IoT sensors automated safety monitoring in dangerous situations, smart meters facilitated compliance with the regulations, while wearables facilitated remote health monitoring.
Nonetheless, competent IoT consultants remain crucial to the success of IoT initiatives and provide essential guidance.
What Does IoT Consulting Involve?
IoT consulting, for instance, Azure IoT consulting, encompasses a range of activities to help organizations leverage IoT technology effectively:
- Assessment: Consultants take inventory of current operations to determine the processes that can take advantage of IoT. It encompasses stakeholder interviews, data analysis, and workshops to identify use cases with the greatest potential.
- Cost-Benefit Analysis: Our IoT consultants also undertake a cost-benefit analysis to develop business cases for proposed IoT projects, providing you with the possibility of quantifying expected ROI.
- Strategy Development: They build IoT strategies and implement roadmaps That Fit Your Business.
- Technology Guidance: Through IoT consultants, we will help you choose the right kind of hardware, software platforms, connectivity protocols, and infrastructure elements applicable to your use cases and technology stack.
- Technical Implementation: They are responsible for technical tasks like prototyping, developing solutions, integrating systems, testing, and imparting knowledge and backing during rollout.
- Security and Compliance: Adhering to IoT data privacy and security standards and meeting regulatory requirements throughout the project lifecycle.
- Training and Support: Providing personnel with necessary training and continued support to get the most from IoT.
In essence, IoT consultants bridge knowledge gaps and manage the complexities of turning IoT ideas into ambulatory solutions in your distinctive business environment. Their strategic and technology proficiency contributes to the fast track of IoT programs.
Overcoming IoT Challenges with Consultants
IoT projects come with a set of potential challenges, including:
- Integration Hurdles: Technical complexities are encountered when trying to connect devices, networks, cloud platforms, databases, and apps from various vendors. Export and analysis of IoT data may also be problematic.
- Security Risks: The legitimizing of IoT enhances the attack surface from an increasing number of different external eras qualifying as internal interfaces. IoT solutions must have security from the first stage.
- ROI Uncertainty: Specifically, demonstrating how IoT initiatives generate an actual return on investment (ROI) can prove difficult in quantifiable terms and make stakeholder support a challenge.
- Management Complexity: Internet of Things (IoT) deployments comprise multiple systems, internal stakeholders, and supply chain partners. Success also depends on effective program management.
- Skills Gap: More importantly, the learning curve for successful IoT implementation is steep, and many organizations do not have the requisite specialized IoT expertise.
This is where IoT consultants are well-positioned to assist organizations. They provide established methodologies, references to previous projects, and a strategic overview. As a result, they possess the capability and knowledge necessary to get stripped off and attain victory in IoT projects very fast that uncertain IT teams with shallow resources.
Suggested Reading: Top Design Considerations for IoT
Typical Tasks of IoT Consultants
IoT consultants are essential to guarantee the success of IoT projects. Here are some everyday activities they engage in:
- User Research: Through in-depth interviews and observations, consultants know precisely the customer’s pain points and where to enhance IoT features so that IoT development is user-driven.
- Data Flow Mapping: These provide visual illustrations of data flow from sensors and devices through landmarks, networks, and clouds to achieve seamless data integration.
- Hardware Selection: As vendors, consultants suggest and take appropriate IoT sensors, modules, and communication hardware for the project.
- Prototyping: Consultants use scaled-down infrastructures and sample data sets to build simplified prototypes of IoT, which help validate the technical approaches more quickly.
- Architecture Design: They optimize across the entire architecture and integrate cloud infrastructure, data layers, application interfaces, and information flows to ensure system-wide performance, reliability, and security.
- Embedded Software Development: For instance, firmware running on devices with onboard intelligence that consultants may develop process data at the edge.
- Testing: Consultants perform robust security vulnerability testing on IoT solutions, develop automated regression testing, and conduct full-scale field testing in real-world environments.
The importance of IoT consultants to the success of IoT projects is underscored by these tasks, which demand a high level of expert knowledge.
The IoT Consulting Landscape
The IoT consulting landscape is huge. For instance, the Azure IoT consulting environment is crowded with different vendors selling different services. Some offer fully encompassing end-to-end consultant services, ranging from creativity and strategy through application development to security testing. Other focuses are on either the strategy or market research in the IoT industry. The same applies to other IoT consulting domains as well.
Strategy Consulting: Traditional management consulting firms like MBB (McKinsey, BCG, Bain) are now joining the IoT strategy consultancy space. They provide businesses with frameworks and market insights to maximize the value of their IoT projects. These firms channel investment funds into IoT companies, for example, Cimation and Bright Wolf (Tareq & Khaled, 2014), including other specialty firms such as Harbor Research that provide IoT-specific strategy consultancy and help in developing roadmaps for cloud infrastructure, mobile, edge computing, machine learning, and IoT.
Market Researchers: IoT-focused market research firms write reports that help businesses learn about market variables. For instance, dedicated Azure IoT consultants provide affordable Azure IoT consulting elements like competitive intelligence and custom research to meet client needs. Beecham Research Limited (BRL) and Compass Intelligence are notable examples.
Product Design: The fact remains that there are those firms that intentionally engage in designing and developing connected physical and digital products and environments for customers. For example, the Fjord (part of Accenture) offers portfolio design of IoT products for target applications such as smart cities, smart homes, and intelligent transportation & mobility.
Hardware/Software Consultants: The services that these consultants provide are market-ready, end-to-end IoT products. The firm’s solutions assist companies in avoiding costly mistakes in the selection of hardware components and interoperability. Vates, Mesh Systems, and Design 1st are examples of vendors in this category.
They may, thus, have difficulty incorporating IoT into their businesses and realizing the full potential of the technology. The IoT landscape is diverse, and various specialized firms provide expertise to support the business implementation of IoT projects.
Conclusion
Therefore, IoT consulting services remain pivotal in 2024 and beyond since IoT is evolving at a rapid pace and has become an intricate subject. However, as the number of IoT devices and applications increases, companies have hurdles in utilizing this technology to their ultimate benefit.
The IoT consultants have deep knowledge in strategy, implementation, and confronting various hurdles that accompany implementing IoT to guarantee its success.
Whether it is driving operational efficiency, improving security, or exploring new revenue streams, IoT consultants become significant partners. Through their support, businesses can take advantage of the IoT capabilities, remain competitive, and invest with their eyes open in the growing IoT ecosystem.
Avigna is a top IoT Consulting firm in India. Our clientele spans global manufacturing leaders to national technology giants. Email us at queries@avigna.ai to avail of our IoT Consulting Services. Learn more about us on LinkedIn.
