IDG Contributor Network: Enterprises evaluate the costs of building versus buying an IoT platform
Almost every week we speak with an enterprise that is curious about building its own IoT application enablement platform (AEP) or IoT device management (DM) platform. The idea is straight-forward – an enterprise wants total control over the technology it deploys, so it chooses to hire developers to build the perfect, inexpensive platform.
Then what happens? Sometimes everything goes exceedingly well and the IoT platform delivers as anticipated. Other times, the enterprise determines
- it takes more time and money to build a platform that anticipated
- it takes more staff to support the platform on-going than anticipated
- it is very hard to keep the platform features up-to-date compared to the features offered from best-in-class vendors’ IoT platforms
- the initial in-house platform was great, but scaling and modifying the platform to meet future requirements is exceedingly difficult due to the chosen platform architecture
So, what are the total enterprise costs of building an enterprise-grade IoT platform versus buying IoT platform services from a third-party AEP or DM vendor? It really depends on the IoT solution that the enterprise wants to deploy.