The Doppler Quarterly Winter 2018 | Page 53

The appeal of this is immediately apparent: the more connected devices a business has, the more opportu- nities to improve visibility and make better decisions on how to operate. Large enterprises, especially those that are distrib- uted, with many locations and assets to monitor, are struggling with the surging need to connect, main- ta in and effectively manage all the devices. At the same time, as enterprises begin to realize the disrup- tive potential of IoT, they are struggling with how to rapidly meet the changing needs of the business while building solutions and infrastructure that will scale securely and cost-effectively. The Lean Startup Philosophy Four years ago, when my last startup was incubating a new automated IoT logistics solution, we decided to build it as a cloud-based service running on AWS. At the time, this was an obvious choice. We were firm believers in the Lean Startup, a popular book by Eric Ries, in which “failing fast,” “minimum viable product (MVP),” and “DevOps principles” were the order of the day. Building on top of AWS quickly provided us with global reach at reasonable cost while we developed the initial MVP, secured our initial customers and scaled the company. We leveraged a variety of the then-available AWS services, such as compute, stor- age and database, but by and large we had to develop most of the core services ourselves using open source technologies and our own homegrown analytical models. Fast forward a few years. If we were starting today, our design and architectural approach would be very different. In the fast-moving world of startups — and of today’s most innovative enterprises as well — time- to-market is absolutely critical to any initiative’s chance of success. In the case of a startup, it also can mean the very survival of the company. Therefore, today there would be a low-to-zero per- cent chance that we would build a platform from the ground up. Rather, we would develop our solution on top of someone else’s cloud-based IoT platform. But which one would we choose? As we say in the con- sulting world: “It depends...” Indeed, the answer would very much depend on which industries, solu- tions, geographies and markets our products were seeking to serve. Lock-In Concerns We often hear concerns from our clients regarding “cloud-lock,” where clients seek to “maintain option- ality,” and then make design decisions that rely heav- ily on generic, open source products and tools. How- ever, they make this compromise of perceived code portability at the expense of leveraging native, highly optimized, cloud vendor-provided services and fea- tures that can dramatically increase solution performance. The exact same argument can be made against “plat- form-lock,” where choosing the wrong vendor may limit future integration or deployment capabilities. While there may, in fact, be a trade-off in terms of absolute, long-term flexibility when making a plat- form decision, in many cases the benefits gained in capability, consistency and time-to-market far out- weigh the risks of lingering platform-lock concerns. While every client has its own set of technical and business challenges, as consultants we often observe patterns across clients as we deliver solutions. Our clients value the experience, frameworks and reus- able assets we bring to the table, which in turn allow us to implement best practices quickly and achieve the shortest possible time-to-value. One of the most effective ways we achieve this is by focusing on, and building competency in, what we believe to be the best-of-breed IoT platforms that are quick to deploy from an infrastructure perspective, and that subsequently allow us to build and deploy robust business applications and solutions on top. In other words, there are a lot of factors tied up in helping our clients choose the right platform for their needs, and ensuring that it is quickly adopted by the business, its employees, partners and customers. Choosing the right platform can unlock tremendous value and set our clients on the path to success. Choosing the wrong one may lead to project delays and missed opportunities. WINTER 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 51