The Road Ahead For IT, From A Venture Capitalist's View
Submitted by Kyle Alspach on
What about the opportunity with IoT?
What we've seen traditionally in M2M, you had one of three things. You had connectivity players -- the Sierra Wirelesses of the world. And on the other end, you had carriers. And there were intermediaries, reselling bandwidth as it relates to specific applications, so the carrier doesn't have to go out and develop vertical expertise.
Continuing to develop vertical expertise are companies like Samsara. Samsara's first vertical is focused around fleet. They've got their own very inexpensive connectivity box, and then you pay $10 a month per device connected, to get all of this fleet management, with software capabilities on top. So they can go vertical by vertical to go after IoT. That's one way I see IoT invested against. That's likely the easier place for channel partners to play, to build domain expertise around specific areas -- go after connected car, go after fleet management, industrial automation, HVAC. The good thing about IoT is that the customer already knows they have to have a subscription to have the connectivity. So that might be anywhere between a couple bucks, or if there are major bandwidth requirements, $30 to $40 a month per device. So there's an ability for the channel partner to add on recurring revenue sitting next to connectivity.