Capturing the real IoT market, Telcos taking a data first approach

I recently read on a Wall Street Journal blog that IDC says the IoT market is supposed to reach $1.7 Trillion by 2020. Let’s be clear here, not 1.7 BILLION, but 1.7 TRILLION US Dollars.

At Canonical, we’re feverishly working to help our telco and service provider partners best monetize themselves in that burgeoning space. But it raises an interesting question. Are telcos capturing the real IoT market?

I innocently ask, but if you’re in the business of providing access and connectivity, have you thought beyond just brokering connections? If we look at how Google and other born-on-the-net companies monetize data, it isn’t the data pipe or the data flow that holds the real value.

The real value seems to be held in the information about the data flow. Who’s doing what, and when? Why are they doing it? How often do they do it? Was it prompted? These are the sort of questions that lead to monetized answers. Business value and new lines of business are derived from data manipulation every day.

If you’re a telco or a service provider, and you’re sitting in the middle of the data path, have you considered the tremendous potential value of the seemingly irrelevant bits of data surrounding that data path? Better understanding your customers’ actions, predicting when they’ll spike, what they’ll want next, and proactively offerings services that they may or may not already know they want, are all ways of adding additional revenue to your bottom line.

While many telcos want to do more with the data available to them, they may not have the technical expertise to do the analysis. They may not even have the software, or understand which pieces of software to use together. Canonical has published a use-case example-based eBook that explains the importance of the data, specific situations to look at the data, and is even prescriptive as to the potential components of a solution.

To learn more about the importance of a data first revenue model, download the eBook, Analytics and Big Data, Flexible Solutions for Evolving Telcos.

Download eBook