...from what has gone before

In the past companies always built their own operational IoT tools from the ground up because they had no choice - there were no off-the-shelf solutions. Even today, many companies still try a DIY approach initially, often not as an intentional decision but as the evolution of what starts as a script that a developer hacks together one day when the manual approach of using spreadsheets etc. stops working (typically around 100 devices deployed). 

The trouble with in-house tools is that they take time and money to develop (which is time and money not spent on building your core offering) and that they are usually only able to answer the questions that the developer thought needed answering. As the company evolves, the questions get more numerous and more varied, because they are now being asked by Customer Services people, Ops people, Product Managers and senior execs. Then begins the painful loop of "think of a question, ask a developer to fix the tool so it can answer it, wait a week, find that the answer isn't what you needed" and so on - incredibly frustrating and expensive, and meanwhile the customers are not getting looked-after.

In contrast, as a tool built for a specific purpose, DevicePilot is uniquely able to answer almost any operational question on the telemetry coming from your IoT devices from day 1, including complex queries on time-series data. For example, no other tool can answer the question "if I expect to hear from each device hourly, then what was my overall uptime over the past week?". Or "what percentage of my sites have at least one device available 95% of the time?".

DevicePilot is so robust, good-looking and easy-to-use that you can even give your customers access to it, when they ask you to report your KPI performance (they will!). Producing these reports alone can take days per week without DevicePilot.