Gartner report says 8.4 billion things are connected in the world today through IoT and this figure could increase to 20 Billion things by the year 2020. The consumer segment is the largest segment of users with 5.2 billion users now. This goes to say that the consumers like us are the daily users of IoT more than the businesses and the growth is happening at a rapid pace. Today, our world is taken by a huge digital transformation be it monitoring your health, home appliances, energy consumption, transportation etc. Everything would get connected in the future and a large chunk of data will evolve for monitoring, control, and hence decision.
In an exclusive interaction with Channel Times, Sidharth Subramani, Director, Spectrum7 Technologies, throws light on the IoT adoption in India and his expansion plans.
Channel Times: What are the key industries that adopt IoT and what are the reasons they are depending heavily on IoT?
Subramani: Key industries that are early adopters are the Oil and Gas, Logistics, Energy, Automobiles, Smart cities, Infrastructure, and manufacturing. These industries need to use data to monitor and control their key parameters for quality, safety, cost, prediction and business performance enhancements. We have seen the Oil and gas, Logistics, Energy industries being heavily dependent on these IoT devices as they have to remotely monitor their assets and control them, which otherwise is an extremely difficult and error filled task of manual data collection.
Channel Times: There are predictions that the emergence of IoT might boost the sale of IT hardware and component products. What is your view on this?
Subramani: The emergence of IoT has definitely boosted the sale of component products as IOT device is largely dependent on quality components. There will be a surge in the demand for the electronics and communications experts and components. There will also be an increase in the demand for communications network services and as a result the hardware related to it. However, IT hardware as such will see a slow growth as Cloud-as-a-platform for the data storage collected from IoT devices are gaining more popularity. More cloud space storage concepts like IaaS and PaaS will be seeing a growth of businesses.
Channel Times: How much Indian CIOs are prepared for IoT? What is the right time that deploying IoT might bring RoI to the organization?
Subramani: A research in partnership with Frost and Sullivan reveals India ranks the second highest, behind China, in IoT-enabled customer maturity compared with other APAC Markets. 40 percent of the respondents have quoted saying they are trying to incorporate IoT into their businesses. The Indian CIOs are seeing IoT as key enablers to provide customer experiences and a large number of trials are being conducted across India with many successful ones.
The Right time to deploy IoT is the time you install an asset in your organization. IoT is more about asset performance management and the more you have control over your assets, the more savings and faster ROI you will get on that asset.
Channel Times: In current scenario, there are less channel partner in the IoT space in India. What is the reason and what should one do to specialize in IoT?
Subramani: The reason for fewer channel partners in IoT space is due to the lack of understanding of the solutions that are needed for a business. They see IoT as an electronic device and how to build it rather than on what is required for the business and what parameters are needed to be collected for the business to get faster ROI and optimal performance management. In Spectrum7 we believe in customizing the IoT for each and every business and build unique solutions for each use case. This has been our success. Business acumen, Electronics and communication knowledge is essential to specialize in IoT.
Channel Times: Being a company with Bootstrap funding, what were the key milestones of your organization till date?
Subramani: The key objectives that we had for our company was to have a lean operations team that will deliver maximum potential, highly skilled staff and best in the class performance review management with respect to sales and operations. The key objective given to the staff is Customer satisfaction through quality delivery and business value addition to customers. This has helped us to bring new customers within a short period of time and able to sustain them. Repeat orders are the focus areas which helped us in the bootstrap situation.
Channel Times: Who are the key (OEMs) vendors you are working with and what are the industrial verticals you are looking forward to work on?
Subramani: We work with Oracle, Microsoft for cloud solutions and have premium partnerships with these vendors on cloud space. With respect to IoT, we have our own in-house skilled team which runs an IoT lab and develop their own devices with components from qualified vendors.
Channel Times: What is your roadmap for this financial year?
Subramani: The roadmap this year for us are to financially reach USD 5 million revenue across lines of businesses; to get a list of satisfied customers and their testimony; create three or more use cases in IoT that would touch the lives of common man; go global; create at least one use case in the healthcare industry, energy conservation, water management and safe environment.
Channel Times: What are the three key plans that might help your organization grow financially, geographically and vertically?
Subramani: The plans include focus on key industry vertical such as F&B and Manufacturing; to ensure greater quality; and to offer customer satisfaction and reference with testimony.