On Wednesday the 27th of April at 1000 ET we’ll ran a TADSummit Revisited with Drew Johnson, VP Engineering, Aeris Communications for a deep-dive Q&A on his presentation “Forget Mobile-First … Move your customers to IoT-First.” You can view the Q&A session live or recorded in the video at the end of this weblog, or just click here. Here are the previous TADSummit Revisited sessions.

Aeris Communications is a global IoT (Internet of Things) connectivity, data, and analytics services provider. Drew shared important lessons on building a successful M2M/IoT business as a carrier and how to move customers toward an IoT-First approach.

Drew provided excellent insights and guidance for developers on the areas where real business opportunities reside. Not in the hype of consumer PAN (Personal Area Networks), rather in the massive untapped area of enterprises who make physical products, or have physical products in the field that have been scared off M2M in the past by the costs and complexity. Given the consumerization of the technologies, the greater control possible by the enterprise with eSIM, and the integrated platform provided by Aeris Communications opens up a market far larger than all of M2M today.

Drew also hopes to be sharing at TADSummit 2016 some of Aeris’s work on web components (reusable widgets) to help developers create disruptive innovations in the presentation and action segment of the IoT ecosystem. As Drew commented, “we’re really only at the very beginning of this market.”

Questions Received so far:

1. How do you differentiate Aeris given all the IoT middleware / brokers / platforms being promoted at the moment?
2. Given the explosion in generic IoT platforms, when do you think we will see the IoT crash?
3. Is the bulk of your business over mobile network? What other networks do you solutions cover?
4. What is your view of eSIM? Does it significantly alter the IoT business?
5. Can you trust telcos to keep 2G or 4G systems running in 10 years time?
6. Go to market in any emerging business is critical, which of direct sales, partners, integrators, etc. is your most productive channel?
7. Your business appears built on 3 legs of CaaS, Apps/Analytics, and vertical offers. Can any of these 3 be a stand along business, or are all 3 required for a viable business? Where do you spend most of your time across all 3?
8. What’s your view on Cisco buying Jasper, and Kore buying Wyless?
9. Are independent IoT developers that important at the moment? Or is it integration with vertical customer applications that is more important?
10. You highlight the importance of data insights, how willing are your enterprise customers to share their data? Are the insights within a specific enterprise implementation?
11. You highlighted Nest, but given its current problems, has consumer hime IoT reached a ceiling in adoption given the hype? Can turning the thermostat down by 2F generate more savings than being smart?
12. Is the Sleep Apena case WiFi or mobile?
13. You present the most compelling practical case for IoT in the automative industry I’ve seen. What do you see as the top automotive applications?
14. Military, automotive and industrial manufacturing have been stalwarts of the M2M business for decades.  What other verticals do you see being the next IoT/M2M adopters given its consumerization?
15. Would you please provide some examples of event generation partner opportunities?
16. Where would you advise developers focus in becoming partners in the “presentation and action” segment of the ecosystem?

TADSummit 2015 Presentation and Slides:

TADSummit Revisited Q&A Session: