Rapid research and development cycles and the ability to design solutions quickly to meet customer uses are crucial to provide commercially viable Internet of Things (IoT) services and solutions in the fast-evolving IoT ecosystem, says information and communication technology consulting and services company Vox cloud and managed services executive head Craig Freer.

Similar to other disruptive technologies, the first point of departure must be to address business-use cases and solve pain points, he emphasises.

“The solutions must make commercial sense to be viable and to add the expected value for users. However, the IoT environment is constantly evolving, with new devices and use cases appearing almost daily.”

This requires that companies providing IoT platforms and services develop and deploy IoT solutions quickly, and adapt clients’ IoT solutions to meet new uses or to include new devices.

Most IoT adoptions are progressive, with clients’ uses becoming more advanced as the benefits are proven. This, once again, drives the need for rapid development and agile reaction to changing client demands.

Vox has built a team of IoT developers who can build and deploy IoT systems within days for most use cases, with their constant work and research and development also bolstering the company’s ability to leverage new devices and meet new demands from clients as the environment evolves, explains Freer.

“One of our clients’ use cases started as a simple antitampering system. “The client then changed the system to provide asset tracking and monitoring. Even this is evolving further and has become a condition monitoring and automated maintenance alert system.”

The rental space, for example, is mirroring this pattern of evolving use cases, with the telemetry from rental units being used to evaluate how well the units were cared for during use and automatically manage billing for excess time if the units are not returned in time.

Similarly, IoT systems have been deployed at farms and in the agriculture industry to reduce and prevent stock theft, and manage equipment, which enhance productivity.