Congratulations to DevicePilot customer POD Point on their acquisition by energy giant EDF. We're proud to play our small part in their journey.

A lovely definition of product-market fit is Sequoia's: "The customer's hair is on fire and all you have is a brick – so they'll try to put the fire out with the brick". Over the last few years DevicePilot has transformed from a brick to a fire-blanket for companies like POD Point who are scaling and need to monitor their connected services, and we continue to evolve thanks to all the feedback from our customers. This month we released two more powerful KPI features and also documented our simple-but-powerful Deep Linking capabilities to improve your service monitoring workflow.

Respected IoT analysts Beecham Research released a useful report in conjunction with several IoT players into why IoT projects fail. The findings that particularly resonated for me are:

• (p10) the biggest strategic priority is "optimisation of service operations"
• (p14) biggest cause of failure is "failure to change the operational model"
• (p19) biggest cause of failure in pilots is "high cost of scaling"

I laughed when I saw that the percentage of "successful projects" according to technical people was about twice that of the same metric according to business people – a classic case of "it works...but isn't useful"?

You've doubtless heard the outrage that Sonos provoked when it announced it would no-longer support hardware that was on-sale as little as two years ago - and then had to somewhat retract that position. Clumsily-handled, but I could empathise as I went through similar anguish at my previous company AlertMe (eventually hardware just becomes too-old to support). But also perhaps a failure to think ahead, especially for expensive, substantial, well-made things like speakers (many of us have Hi Fi speakers we bought 30+ years ago which still work perfectly-well). Perhaps if they'd had a recurring revenue model they might have planned for a "smart hub, dumb speakers" architecture, which would have been more efficient to keep up-to-date.

Foundries.io are ex-Linaro folk who offer open-source, pre-built Linux images with a CI/CD framework for managing them in the field (e.g. upgrades). Reminiscent of Balena, except they are open-source, can't see your data, and claim much better security. This is exactly the kind of technology component that a hardware company should buy rather than try building themselves, because of opportunity cost and because there are so many ways to get this stuff wrong.

Other IoT news: 

• LoRAWAN (and The Things Network in particular) is now a proper ecosystem able to fill large auditoria with their conferences. I love their frank, Dutch, take that "the accumulation of all the screw-ups led to the maturity that LoRAWAN has today". It's the hard yards that make for success in IoT.
• I finally had a Smart Meter installed at home this month, so that I could take advantage of Octopus' Agile dynamic half-hourly electricity pricing which even sometimes goes negative if wind blows hard at night (great for charging my EV via my POD Point charger). There's a really interesting story here about how IoT is enabling the electricity system to co-ordinate shifting smoothly to 100% renewables.
• MachNation launched a suite to test IoT platforms at scale.
• Iridium enabled their AWS IoT-enabled satellite connectivity to roam over the 80% of the world not covered by terrestrial networks.
• WND claims to have achieved 90% population coverage for Sigfox in the UK in 18 months
• We nearly finally lost contact with Voyager 2 this month, and reading about Boeing's two recent Starliner snafu's made me glad I never worked on space systems.
• Two pieces of AIoT news as AI (well, ML) continues to appear at the edge of IoT networks:
  • ARM launched a new processor core plus a ML accelerator core which can increase neural network speed in IoT devices by 400x and (perhaps more importantly) power-efficiency by 35x.
  • XMOS adapt their core for ML use
• Douglas Adams would have loved pedestrian crossings begging for a password reset
• Malware infects IoT devices which are running Windows 7
• A Huawei chip used in millions of IoT devices has a back-door
• Plenty of good lessons for IoT in this entertaining rant on the challenges of Ops
• Sierra Wireless coined the term "Cloudification of IoT" and produced a build vs. buy RoI calculator
• Stanford Hospital has really embraced IoT
• The RAEng has lots of suggestions for government IoT policy
• Berg reviewed the growth of classic Smart City applications like lighting, parking and bins

Finally - if you haven't already - please do complete our CMM model questionnaire to test your readiness to deliver at scale.

Until next month.

-Pilgrim