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Limitations of Proprietary Platforms – The Missing Piece of the IoT Puzzle

It sounds like the perfect IoT solution—one platform to rule them all. A symbiotic ecosystem of connected devices with cutting-edge technology to automate your business. Unfortunately, proprietary IoT platforms have not risen to this ideal. At best, proprietary platforms allow for tight integration with carrier networks and provide a vehicle for self-service provisioning and connectivity management. Don’t get me wrong, these are important and necessary abilities in automating devices. But let’s face it, those abilities are not revolutionary in terms of creating a streamlined, automated business.

What proprietary platforms do well can be more restrictive than it is empowering for today’s IoT environment. To understand why these platforms don’t allow IoT to live up to its promise, we have to look at why they were created.

Why Proprietary?

In the beginning, IoT platforms were created like industrial machines. They were designed to give operators access to a large number of IoT devices, so they could automate a large number of things. They were not designed for ease-of-use or administration and, although analytics may be built into many of these platforms, they are vague on actionable insights. They do the heavy lifting but aren’t built to help with big-picture strategy. 

The data is overwhelming

When we dig deeper, we see the achilles heel of the proprietary platform model is its lack of data organization and management. The data created by connected devices is entirely overwhelming and also useless on its own. For example, managing 30,000 SIMs x 3 carrier rate plans equals 6.2B data combinations. Spreadsheets and manual reporting aren’t going to get you very far with that much data. The data the proprietary platforms provide is raw and isolated, which makes it difficult to draw any conclusions from. Aggregation is where true analytical insights happen, and these platforms cannot provide it.

Start liberating the value trapped in your business

With the amount of data being produced by connected devices, businesses need to be able to view all that data as a global picture in real-time. When data is globally viewed in real-time, business leaders can clearly see inefficiencies, redundancies, device downtime, and more. They can immediately take action to rectify issues and immediately realize significant cost savings. Better yet, this can all happen without upgrading a single device or changing a carrier. You DON’T have to rip and replace to start realizing the full power of IoT. You can run things better with the systems you currently have and even without added cost. 

Moving past proprietary to business process automation

The good news about proprietary platforms is they offer open APIs for integration. When a third-party application, like Simetric, accesses the data and insights locked in these platforms, a business can be empowered. We give our customers access to single-pane, high-level business process insights and they start saving up to 50% of monthly operational costs. Data management is the missing piece of the IoT puzzle. It’s the piece that takes a business from chasing the promise of device automation to realizing the potential of business process automation.

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