Eseye IoT Predictions for 2023 and Beyond Mid-Year Update

Larry Socher

SVP Strategy & Alliances

LinkedIn

Towards the end of every year Eseye publishes a set of IoT trends and predictions for the upcoming year. But this year feels very different. As Nick Earle, Eseye’s CEO, and Larry Socher, their SVP of Strategy & Alliances, pointed out in January, they believe that the industry is on the cusp of a major inflection point and a set of market disruptions, and that 2023 will be the year control shifts from the network operator to the enterprise and the device! 

Now that we are mid-way through 2023, we thought it would be a great idea to review the five trends outlined in the annual IoT predictions report and see if there is evidence in the market to support our assertions. So let’s see whether the predictions are coming true. 

One: The MNO proprietary lock-in finally cracks with increased choice and the hyperscaler threat.  

We are clearly continuing to see evidence of this trend. Vodafone is still in the process of spinning out their IoT organization, and the Ericsson has completed their transaction moving the IoT Accelerator Platform to Aeris .  Mobile operators are scrambling to react to these changes.  At the same time the hyperscalers continue to push out, as seen with AWS offering Private Networks (5G) and finally seeing competitive connectivity options like Amazon Sidewalk go into production. 

Two: Interoperability between public and private networks becomes a priority.

As more enterprises are testing and deploying Private LTE and 5G Networks to support manufacturing, warehousing, utilities, mining and other use cases, we are starting to see more solutions on the market to facilitate roaming to and from private networks (e.g. truck leaves Private Network at mine and roams onto Public Networks on the highway).  Not only has Eseye started to offer solutions to facilitate this roaming, but there are many other examples of companies moving to address the challenges, as illustrated by this Syniverse, Athonet and Federated Wireless announcement.

Three:  The ascendance of ‘network agnostic’ and ‘multi-RAT.’ 

One could argue that this trend has been evolving for a while, but we are clearly seeing increased adoption of multiple Radio Access Types (RATs) to solve specific problems.  A great example is Telli Health, one of Eseye’s Remote Patient Monitoring customers, adding LoRaWAN to their cellular solutions. 

Another example is Eseye enabling Precision Animal Solutions Remote Early Disease Identification (REDI) to prevent respiratory illness from devastating a herd using a combination of Bluetooth sensors through a cellular gateway to their cloud-based platform.  

With the increased promise of seamlessly roaming between terrestrial and satellite-based cellular networks with the 3GPP R.17 NTN standards, we are also starting to see the emergence of pre-R17 satellite roaming solutions as illustrated by T-Mobile and Starlink’s announcement.

Four: Consumer and enterprise IoT use cases converge to create new connectivity challenges.  

Prediction four is perhaps one of the most exciting of the bunch. We are clearly seeing evidence that the lines between traditionally enterprise use cases such as the utility grid, patient and security monitoring and consumer use cases predominantly in the digital home are rapidly blurring.  Enterprises are rapidly racing to establish a beachhead in the digital home. 

This can be seen in Schneider Electric’s Home Energy Management solutions that were showcased at CES, Google’s partnership with ADT to provide DIY Home Security options, and Atrium Health’s Virtual Edge that uses Best Buy’s current health platform to hub patient monitoring devices in the home.  

Five: IoT starts and ends with the device

The final prediction about increased focus on the device is perhaps the hardest to measure.  In their IoT Connectivity survey last year Kaleido Intelligence identified hardware design as the most difficult challenge for IoT deployments with 84% of the respondents identifying it as a major issue, and the most likely factor contributing to Gartner’s observation that “80% of all IoT projects fail before they are even launched.” 

While Eseye continues to see significant growth in customers using our IoT device connectivity design and other services including our recently released IoT Readiness Level (IRL) assessment and LaunchPad program, the importance of getting connectivity designed for flexibility and resilience right up front cannot be overstated.  Eseye has always understood how critical device connectivity is to IoT, and has continued to invest in device intelligence software (SMARTconnect) and hardware (Hera routers) that codifies our decades of experience building, testing, integrating and troubleshooting connectivity into solutions that de-risk and enable the most difficult global deployments. 

In our mid-year reflection, we clearly believe that we got it right, and that 2023 will be the year control shifts from the network operator to the enterprise and the device.  We also believe that Eseye is uniquely positioned as only provider with the expertise and solutions from device to cloud to empower the enterprise to take and keep control of their IoT connectivity. 

Larry Socher

SVP Strategy & Alliances

LinkedIn

Larry spent the last 26 years at Accenture where he was most recently responsible for all Cloud & Infrastructure solutions and partnerships globally. During his tenure, Larry ran the Enterprise Network Practice, was CTO of the Service Provider Network Practice which he then proceeded to run operationally.  Larry leveraged a unique blend of deep cloud, network/5G, device, IoT/Edge and operations/AIOps skills and experience to help large enterprise, government agency and communications service provider clients transform their businesses, navigating an increasingly complex ecosystem to help them take advantage of the convergence and disruption in the market. Larry graduated from Dartmouth College with BA Major in Economics and English. Larry also holds three patents.