After spending two interesting days in New York recently (aren’t they all) attending the International Security Conference (ISC) East, it has come to my attention that the physical security technology market is in critical need of device relationship management. The ISC East is the smaller of two annual events sponsored by the Security Industry Association (SIA) that brings together the physical security ecosystem - OEMs, dealers, integrators and buyers. This market includes access control, video surveillance, alarm systems and monitoring, fire, environmental safety and related services. For reasons we don’t like to think about, this is a large, growing and highly strategic technology sector. Think hundreds of billions of dollars in hardware, software and related services. It’s a perfect macrocosm of business and technology trends shaping so many industries in our world today. Hardware is foundational but largely commoditized. Software and services are highly strategic and form the basis for new business models - and challenges.

Of all the potential competitors and partners I enjoy following in the market - VMware is one of my favorites. And there was a flurry of IoT and Edge Computing announcements, tweets and blog posts coming out of VMworld this past week in Las Vegas and from their parent company Dell in parallel.

A small team from EdgeIQ descended upon Amelia Island for Field Service East - a gathering of more than 300 professionals dedicated to best practices and technologies that will improve how organizations serve remote customers and products. As first time attendees we were curious about the aspirations of leaders within this segment. Service is the critical link to customer retention, reducing operational expenses, but also growing revenue through new revenue streams - most often service revenue streams.

Barron’s Tiernan Ray recently published a great blog about how the ‘Old Guard’ including Cisco, Dell, HPE are taking advantage of the backlash against the surprisingly high cost of cloud computing. As it turns out the race to zero initiated by the cloud leaders (AWS, Microsoft, and Google) was really a strategy to get organizations to host applications or store data in the cloud for almost nothing and then entice those customers with rich and powerful services to augment data and applications. Those additional services are far from free. I’ll be the first to admit that these are compelling offerings and they are growing exponentially. Have you seen the list of AWS services available today? It’s a periodic table of cloud technologies.

The bulk of my experience primarily comes from a software background, working on medium to large scale projects with a mobile component as well as large-scale data intensive platforms. My formal experience within the “IoT” space is mostly involved with projects tracking data from a large number of connected devices. Coincidentally, I see this quite commonly throughout the industry - besides well designed, innovative hardware, which is of course important, the most interesting market opportunities have to do with managing and deriving insight from the data produced by fleets of devices. This includes efforts to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence either in the edge (the holy grail) or the cloud to that data.