Business Models And The Internet of Things

IoT Business Models

Recently we looked at how wearable tech was changing the workplace, focusing on how the growth of the industry could improve productivity but also raised questions about employees’ privacy, rights, and ‘downtime’. Wearable tech isn’t the only area of cloud computing that’s changing the workplace, however, as the internet of things is starting to reshape years of received wisdom on business models themselves.

Traditionally, the heart of any business model for either a start-up or a well-established company is ‘value creation’. The term means that companies attempt to perform activities that increase the value of a company’s offering and thus encourage their customers’ willingness to pay for it. Historically, the process for doing this has been firstly to identify customers’ needs and then to design solutions that fit those needs – with the consequence that competition between businesses was largely done on a ‘feature versus feature’ then a ‘price versus price’ basis.

The connectivity in the internet of things is changing this model. Products are no longer finished at the point of release – rather a stream of over-the-air updates, new features, and added functionality can be pushed to the customer on a regular basis, while the ability to track how and where products are used makes it possible to respond to customer behaviour without the need to conduct typical market research. Naturally, the internet of things also allows various products to be connected with each other, opening up the possibility of new analytics and new services to allow for more effective forecasting, better process optimisation, and improved customer service experiences.

Albert Shum, Partner Director of UX Design at Microsoft, commented on these new models, saying, “Business models are about creating experiences of value. With the internet of things, you can really look at how the customer looks at an experience – from when I’m walking through a store, buying a product, and using it – and ultimately figure out what more can I do with it and what service can renew the experience and give it new life”.

Elsewhere, the cloud and the internet of things is also helping to create new business models around the theory of ‘value capture’ – ie – the monetisation of customer value. Typically, this has meant ensuring the price of a product has been optimised to to maximise both sales and profits – often supplemented by discrete product sales. Today, however, the internet of things allows for recurring revenue rather than immediately looking to sell the next product – it shifts the onus from commodity advantages, intellectual property rights and brand name on to personalisation, context and network effects between products.

By Daniel Price

Security Breach 10 Useful Cloud Security Tools
Cloud Security Tools Cloud providing vendors need to embed cloud security tools within their infrastructure. They should not emphasize keeping high uptime at the expense of security. Cloud computing has become a business solution for ...
Martin Mendelsohn
The Colonial Pipeline Dilemma The Colonial Pipeline is one of a number of essential energy and infrastructure assets that have been recently targeted by the global ransomware group DarkSide, and other aspiring non-state actors, with ...
Mark Greenlaw
Free Cloud Migrations are Expensive The cloud is becoming the primary place where work gets done. By 2025, Gartner estimates that enterprise spending on public cloud computing will overtake traditional IT hardware. Why? One reason ...
Get Smarter
Higher Education A big challenge for professionals of all ages is time. Balancing the responsibilities of work and life leave little time for self-improvement in the form of education. But ongoing education is more than ...
Gilad David Maayan
What Is Cloud Deployment? Cloud deployment is the process of deploying and managing applications, services, and infrastructure in a cloud computing environment. Cloud deployment provides scalability, reliability and accessibility over the internet, and it allows ...
Louis
More CISOs will have to deliver revenue growth to protect their budgets and grow their careers in 2023 and beyond, and a core part of that will be getting multicloud security right. It’s the most common infrastructure strategy for ...
Steve Prentice
The Era of Microlearning Becoming employable and then staying employable requires ongoing, up to date knowledge, and this can become something of a dilemma. Many of us grew up with a traditional understanding of the ...
Mark Banfield
Implement A Seamless Customer Experience The need for digital interaction has never seemed more critical than it does today. As the coronavirus continues to spread, citizens around the world are being asked to hunker down ...
Answer To Everything.png
The Sticky Note.png
Disaster Recovery Plan.png
Disaster Recovery Plan.png

PLURALSITE

Pluralsight provides online courses on popular programming languages and developer tools. Other courses cover fields such as IT security best practices, server infrastructure, and virtualization. 

(ISC)²

(ISC)² provides IT training, certifications, and exams that run online, on your premises, or in classrooms. Self-study resources are available. You can also train groups of 10 or more of your employees.

CYBRARY

CYBRARY Open source Cyber Security learning. The world's largest cyber security community. Cybrary provides free IT training certificates. Courses for beginners, intermediates, and advanced users are available.