By Philip Dawsey
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a hot topic these days and pretty much all the major players are heavily invested. IoT is the next frontier for tech growth and is worth fighting for with Navigant forecasting annual revenue from shipments of residential IoT devices to increase from $7.3B in 2015 to $67.7B in 2025. With so many players entering the market I thought it would be interesting to look at which ones might be successful and win the IoT game of thrones! The five houses I’ll explore in this post are Google (Brillo), Apple (HomeKit), Samsung (SAMI), Lenovo (NBD), and Amazon (2lemetry/AWS). Each with their own platform for connecting devices, they face off to decide who will reign over this vast empire.
Before jumping into my analysis of each platform, let’s understand what these platforms do and why they’re important. Consumers and vendors want their devices to talk to other devices, thereby making each device that much smarter. Each IoT platform wants devices to communicate and connect on their platform and thus reap the rewards of this control. EcoFactor’s home energy management services, for example, will become much more effective if we can send and receive data freely with any security system and any connected door lock.
While several platforms may live to see the end of this war, there will be only one or two who dominate the landscape just as we have seen with other tech platforms like mobile and desktop. Right now the details of each army (or platform if you’d prefer) are still not completely clear but the infrastructure looks remarkably similar, making it even more likely that several will fail. So without further ado, let’s take a look at who is a pretender and who may ascend the IoT platform throne and win the right to connect our IoT devices!
By virtue of Android, Google has already ensured compatibility with a majority of American mobile phones, the most important device in the IoT. With nest, Dropcam, Revolv and the Works with nest program, they are also well on their way to bringing a large number of other devices onto their platform. Promises about quick development, broad support and detailed reporting are yet to be verified, but with a base in Android, there is little reason to doubt a strong offering. For service providers like EcoFactor, it will be important to see how easy it is for devices to work with each other and share data, which is critical to getting the most out of the IoT. The primary barrier for Brillo is whether the killer app or killer device will go to another platform. Will Google be hesitant to certify competitors to nest or will an Apple product become the must have device in every home? Overall, Brillo (Google’s second IoT foray after Android@Home) looks well defined and Google’s experience bringing device manufacturers onto a platform certainly bodes well.
Apple has many of the same advantages as Google, basically controlling the other half of the smartphone market in the US. There are also already a growing number of compatible devices in the Made for iPhone (MFI) program, including in-house hardware from Apple in development. If a device wants to be part of the program however, it requires a specific wireless chip and software package, which may turn off some manufacturers but it will also ensure the consistent experience Apple is known for. In a departure from the past, even if devices currently in the home are not MFI compliant (they use a rival protocol like Zigbee or Z Wave), there will be a “bridge” made available soon to ensure they can connect. This will likely come in the form of a hub and provide manufacturers the opportunity to sell one more piece of hardware. Wi-fi devices, however, will not be able to connect due to security reasons, which will certainly create some limitations. Another downside to consider is that HomeKit does not offer a truly open system for direct communication between devices, possibly limiting the potential of many IoT devices and making it a less appealing platform. Overall, HomeKit is a promising platform with strong support already, but the “openness” seems to be a mirage and I think restrictions will really limit many devices and functionalities, making this a less than ideal platform as it stands.
Samsung is a device manufacturer at the core, and has decided that all of its IoT devices will be open and not locked into a proprietary ecosystem. This makes sense because they make everything from smartphones to washers to memory chips and want to sell those products regardless of what platform or protocol they communicate through. Samsung acquired SmartThings in August 2014 to serve as a hub that allows many different devices to communicate on various protocols. It more recently announced its Artik chipset and SAMI (Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interaction) IoT platform. SAMI is meant to be as neutral and open as possible, likely more as a means to drive sales of Samsung chips and devices than to serve as the platform of the future for the IoT. Other manufacturers, like Whirlpool, who compete with Samsung are unlikely to connect to this platform making it difficult for Samsung to attract enough devices to make this THE IoT platform of the future. Ultimately, Samsung’s primary goal seems to be moving the IoT ecosystem forward in order to increase hardware and service sales rather than anything else and so this platform will not likely be a long-term solution.
Lenovo is another giant hardware manufacturer getting into the IoT with devices like their new C1, a google glass competitor. The NBD platform, designed to support communication between devices, will initially target the Chinese market. While this may seem far away, Chinese manufacturers including Huawei and Xioami are making huge inroads all over Asia and if IoT device adoption is faster in Asia than in the US, this could lead to a more mature market and platform. Despite this potential though, a lot more information is needed to feel comfortable with this as a platform for the future. Currently there is no foundational infrastructure in place yet and no clear plan for recruiting devices onto the NBD platform. Lenovo is similar to Samsung in that it seems to be more interested in using NBD as a platform for driving hardware sales and ensuring compatibility of their new devices. Since the announcement of the NBD platform in mid-2014 there has been very little news, which is likely an indication that this may be a project to learn more than anything else.
And last but not least, Amazon recently purchased 2lemetry who developed an IoT platform that is protocol agnostic and claims to be able to connect any communicating device. This acquisition comes on top of Amazon’s rollout of their Dash buttons, the echo home assistant, and purchase of Kinesis that processes and analyzes high-volume data streams from many sources in real time. The platform seems to focus more on enabling machine-to-machine deployments for Amazon’s core commerce business than being a platform for the world to build around. Right now it looks like Amazon is looking to stay involved in the internet of things and understand how it can help their business rather than become the ruler of the realm.
Each of these platforms will work with partners, grow, and evolve with the changing landscape, but from my perspective Brillo is the early leader with HomeKit in close second due to their strong mobile bases. The keys to victory, however, remain unclear. Will it be – the sheer number of compatible devices, a killer app, a streamlined development environment, or something else? What we do know is that the result of this IoT platform game of thrones will stay with us for years to come!
