This is my 12th monthly IoT update. I always wonder "will this be a light month for IoT news?" ... but it never is!

Two webinars worth watching:

• Sign-up now for our webinar IoT Service Monitoring - successful companies share their secrets - especially if you have ever asked yourself the critical question: "is my device estate ready to deliver my business?". I look forward to seeing you there.
• Meanwhile watch our recent webinar 360 degree service monitoring co-presented with our new partners EMnify, which shows how to improve customer experience by combining network data with application-level data.

RaaS ("Retail as a Service") is a new term that I heard from one of our customers recently, and according to the report "IoT in Retail Market" it looks to be a market growing from $14.5bn today to $35.5bn by 2025 - driven by the declining cost of IoT-based sensors and connectivity, the increasing adoption of smart payment solutions, and customer demand for a seamless shopping experience. Operations management seems to be the biggest chunk of RaaS value, which includes energy optimization, supply chain optimization, surveillance and security, inventory optimization, and workforce management.

There was some consternation that Philips/Signify are retiring the v1 bridge that connects their popular HUE lights to the internet. But (learning from the Sonos fiasco) I think this is actually a bit of a success – this product is now over 5 years old, and a huge amount has happened in the Smart Home world in that time. Users just need to replace this single, small, low-cost gateway, rather than replacing all their light bulbs.

Over the past two decades I've watched WiFi evolve from unmanaged spectrum using the inefficient ALOHA protocol to an increasingly managed approach, similar to a cellular network. Now the latest version (802.11ax, now known as WiFi 6) uses "Target wake time" to improve device battery life, which could prove useful to IoT devices as well as smartphones.

Other IoT news:

• An analyst recently told me that Telcos are realising that they need deliberate "connectivity by design" for IoT, which might explain Vodafone's acquisition of Grand Centrix. And perhaps also of relevance here is IoTM's concept of "adding value to IoT connectivity".
• The latest report from The Economist /ARM claims that we're entering the "Roaring Twenties" of IoT, with more than half of companies now in early or mature IoT deployment. This chimes with the recent Kaspersky report, which says that 61% of companies are now using IoT.
• Scarily though, Palo Alto Networks says that 98% of IoT network traffic is unencrypted.
• High-value IoT assets such as hospital scanners are struggling to move away from Windows 7 – and cash machines too apparently!
• Keen.io, originally conceived as an IoT time-series database, has been merged with the subscription-billing service Chargify by ScaleWorks which now owns both, so Keen.io is doing event-detection on IoT telemetry (and other workloads) as a front-end to billing.
• Cloud vendors are apparently "jostling for position" in the IoT Analytics market - though I wonder whether there actually is any distinct IoT Analytics market, as it's such a broad definition.
• Electricity prices in Belgium temporarily fell to -20c/kWh for a short period when a UK interconnector failed during excess renewable capacity - imagine how IoT will turn those kinds of problem into opportunities.
• If you're considering a chip-level IoT design, this take on how RISC V is challenging ARM might be of use.

Finally, the whole DevicePilot team sends its best wishes to everyone weathering COVID-19. We moved to full remote working on Friday, for the duration, and our lead engineer Tom spotted this great set of advice on how to do remote-working effectively (written by GitLab, who at 1200+ employees are the largest fully-remote-working company that we know of). I noted that the Linux foundation has open-sourced its IoT disaster relief firmware, and we've been racking our brains to see how we can help - let us know if you spot a way that DevicePilot can e.g. help people to manage critical devices. 

That's all for this month, let's stay safe and look after each other, let us know if there's any way we can help you through these tough times - and don't forget to sign-up for our webinar!

-Pilgrim