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Device Management Presents Barrier to IoT at Scale

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Management of thousands or millions of Internet connected devices is posing a major obstacle to the success of the Internet of Things (IoT), according to DevicePilot (previously 1248).

These concerns are reflected in DevicePilot's survey of 50 companies planning to deploy IoT applications at scale across different industry sectors including environmental and industrial monitoring, elderly care/wellness, smart homes and cities, energy management, refrigeration, retail and public services. The survey ranked "risk to growth" as the most worrying consequence of failing to manage devices, followed by "risk to revenue" and "risk to brand".

This may be one of the reasons why some of the ambitious predictions for IoT devices have not yet been borne out, according to DevicePilot. While 12% of respondents had deployed a million or more devices in the field, 82% had deployed only 1,000 devices or less. However, respondents to the Device Management Survey expect these numbers to grow, with 70% of companies predicting an eventual market size of at least millions of devices and 20% predicting that they will reach the billions level.

“It is clear that most IoT companies are currently managing their connected products manually or by a mixture of manual and automatic processes,” said Pilgrim Beart, CEO at DevicePilot. “But as projects move from pilot to deployment at scale, the time and operational cost of manually logging-in to each device to perform an upgrade or check if it is working becomes a major barrier. Automatic asset management, monitoring and lifetime support are essential for the long term success of the IoT.”

Summary of key survey findings:

■ 61% of companies anticipate 10x growth over the coming year

■ 70% estimate their addressable market to be in the millions of devices - and 9% in the billions

■ The most common business model is a combination of up-front fee plus ongoing service fee

■ Only 18% of companies describe their device management as “highly automated and slick”

■ The biggest perceived risk of not managing devices well is risk to the growth of the company

■ 86% of companies say that as far as managing devices is concerned, they’re either already in trouble, or expect to be within 12 months

Cees Links, veteran of the world of connected devices and currently CEO of GreenPeak Technologies commented, "It sometimes surprises me how many device companies don't even know how many of their devices have been deployed, let alone how many are working. As the IoT matures, users' expectations of service quality are rapidly increasing, and you really have to keep on top of this stuff. When it comes to the smart home we expect all devices to be connected and providing useful information for owners and manufacturers on usage, diagnostics, need for refurbishment and replacement."

"The answer to device management is automation,” added Chris Wright, CTO of Moixa, a business deploying a solar energy storage product. “We need to be connected for multiple reasons including remote management, demand response and performance reporting; and if the product isn’t working or has lost connection, then we can’t bill.”

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Device Management Presents Barrier to IoT at Scale

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Management of thousands or millions of Internet connected devices is posing a major obstacle to the success of the Internet of Things (IoT), according to DevicePilot (previously 1248).

These concerns are reflected in DevicePilot's survey of 50 companies planning to deploy IoT applications at scale across different industry sectors including environmental and industrial monitoring, elderly care/wellness, smart homes and cities, energy management, refrigeration, retail and public services. The survey ranked "risk to growth" as the most worrying consequence of failing to manage devices, followed by "risk to revenue" and "risk to brand".

This may be one of the reasons why some of the ambitious predictions for IoT devices have not yet been borne out, according to DevicePilot. While 12% of respondents had deployed a million or more devices in the field, 82% had deployed only 1,000 devices or less. However, respondents to the Device Management Survey expect these numbers to grow, with 70% of companies predicting an eventual market size of at least millions of devices and 20% predicting that they will reach the billions level.

“It is clear that most IoT companies are currently managing their connected products manually or by a mixture of manual and automatic processes,” said Pilgrim Beart, CEO at DevicePilot. “But as projects move from pilot to deployment at scale, the time and operational cost of manually logging-in to each device to perform an upgrade or check if it is working becomes a major barrier. Automatic asset management, monitoring and lifetime support are essential for the long term success of the IoT.”

Summary of key survey findings:

■ 61% of companies anticipate 10x growth over the coming year

■ 70% estimate their addressable market to be in the millions of devices - and 9% in the billions

■ The most common business model is a combination of up-front fee plus ongoing service fee

■ Only 18% of companies describe their device management as “highly automated and slick”

■ The biggest perceived risk of not managing devices well is risk to the growth of the company

■ 86% of companies say that as far as managing devices is concerned, they’re either already in trouble, or expect to be within 12 months

Cees Links, veteran of the world of connected devices and currently CEO of GreenPeak Technologies commented, "It sometimes surprises me how many device companies don't even know how many of their devices have been deployed, let alone how many are working. As the IoT matures, users' expectations of service quality are rapidly increasing, and you really have to keep on top of this stuff. When it comes to the smart home we expect all devices to be connected and providing useful information for owners and manufacturers on usage, diagnostics, need for refurbishment and replacement."

"The answer to device management is automation,” added Chris Wright, CTO of Moixa, a business deploying a solar energy storage product. “We need to be connected for multiple reasons including remote management, demand response and performance reporting; and if the product isn’t working or has lost connection, then we can’t bill.”

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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