MachNation was excited to attend Bosch Connected World 2019 in Berlin. At this event, thousands gathered to listen to, discover, and network with a set of industrial IoT (IIoT) enterprises. The event provides a unique opportunity to learn about Bosch’s various products, services, and business units, but also to meet executives and IoT practitioners from a wide variety of Bosch partners, customers, and trade associations. MachNation was delighted to see that the event has grown in size to approximately 4400 attendees since its inception in 2014.
MachNation had 3 overall take-aways from the event.
Solutions
BCW is an opportunity to learn about all sorts of IIoT solutions in the market including devices, platforms, software, and services. We were particularly excited to meet HiveMQ, Waylay, AWS, Software AG, Contact Software, Riddle & Code, AVSystem, and others.
In addition, during the keynotes there were demos including connected heavy machinery, electric transport vehicles, robotics equipment, and much more. It was particularly interesting that Bosch chose to create demos that illustrated customers’ journeys with IoT, rather than technology-centric demos divorced from a customer context.
Collaboration and partnerships
Attending BCW, listening to keynotes, having meetings, and seeing various demos reminds us that IoT is based on collaboration and partnerships. Even today, it takes 5-7 technology partners to stand-up a single IoT solution. We simply aren’t at a point in IoT’s evolution where an enterprise can effectively and efficiently build an IoT solution using technology sourced from a single vendor.
In addition to experiencing plenty of vendor-to-vendor partnerships at BCW, MachNation also had the opportunity to see and participate in a vendor-to-consortium partnerships. MachNation was honored to co-sponsor two technology challenges at BCW in conjunction with the Trusted IoT Alliance (TIoTA). TIoTA is an industry consortium focused on bringing together IoT and distributed edge technologies. For the past several months, TIoTA has accepted entries for two technology challenges — a mobility/electric vehicle challenge and a smart construction challenge — wherein teams of enterprises submitted proof-of-concept ideas. At BCW, TIoTA announced the winners of each challenge which included a monetary award and an opportunity to actually build the winning PoC submissions.
Product improvement
MachNation has been following Bosch’s IoT strategy for many years. We continue to be impressed with the overarching commitment to continuous product improvement. This comes into focus at BCW at the keynote sessions, but even more so when speaking with the Bosch employees staffing the various show floor demos and in meetings with Bosch technical and business executives.
MachNation, as the leading firm specialized in testing and benchmarking IoT platforms, continues to notice significant improvement in the capabilities and features exhibited in Bosch IoT Suite. In particular, we were impressed with the device management capabilities inherent in Bosch solutions. While much attention in the industry is often paid to the application-layer of IoT including machine learning, advanced analytics techniques, and fanciful data visualization, less attention is paid to the extremely difficult process of managing the IoT device lifecycle. Conquering this set of tasks separates those enterprises that are ready to deploy IoT at scale from those that are still struggling in proof-of-concepts.
All-in-all, MachNation was delighted to attend BCW 2019 in Berlin and we look forward to hearing more about Bosch’s successes in IoT.