The Internet of Things (IoT) and Boston are rapidly becoming inextricably linked. With firms like PTC, GE, LogMein, iRobot and booming tech and academic communities in its midst, Boston is poised to be a major geographic player and rival Silicon Valley in the innovation and next generation of technology, particularly for business-to-business (B2B) concerns.

Making Sense of the IoT Platform Leaders

Three of the main IoT platforms are creations of Boston-based firms. Below is a brief on each of the platforms and applicability.

• Xively by LogMein: “A product management solution that provides companies the ability to build, launch and run their connected products and business.” (Xively)
• Thingworx by PTC: “ThingWorx reduces the time, cost, and risk required to build innovative Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.” (Thingworx)
• Predix by GE: “Cloud-based platform (PaaS) for Industrial Internet applications, combines people, machines, big data and analytics.” (Predix)

IoT Statistics ¹

• 6.4 billion connected “things” will be in use in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015.
• 4 billion connected things will be in use in the consumer sector in 2016, and will reach 13.5 billion in 2020.
• In terms of hardware spending, consumer applications will amount to $546 billion in 2016, while the use of connected things in the enterprise will drive $868 billion in 2016.

Core Concepts

• Begin to identify and organize your internal team and federation of partners across needed skills. Needed skills may include areas of expertise such as data capture and analysis, visual and design reality, dash-boarding, hardware, service design consulting and design and development.
• Obsess about how your customers want to experience you. Consider process improvements to enhance and continually garner your customers feedback on your solutions.
• Consider how you might reinvent your business as a service and not as a product. Business models are going to be interrupted with the IoT. Proactively evaluating your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats is paramount to remaining competitive and relevant.