5. Technical Expertise

While solution providers should focus on vertical expertise and solving problems in the workplace, technical acumen will of course be critical to implementing IoT solutions.

"Technical expertise is [important] in three areas, certainly connectivity is a big piece of it, networking, and security is a big piece of it," said Cisco's Shakib (pictured). "The data acquisition and application development is the third piece of it. Those are the areas that we help partners along or bring other partners to the party to deliver those sort of things."