| |SEPTEMBER 201819CIOReviewBUILD VS BUY - THE IOT PLATFORM DECISION By Karen Ravindranath, Program Head - WebNMS IOT he Internet of Things! It's incredible how IoT has opened up a plethora of op-portunities for busi-nesses, helping them achieve overall efficiency, improved productivity and substantial returns. According to estimations by the Mc-Kinsey Global Institute, IoT will have a total economic impact of up to USD 11 trillion by the year 2025! That explains why current day busi-nesses have started to imbibe the technology into their systems to stay ahead of the competition. Organizations are expecting so-lution providers to leverage IoT and offer turnkey solutions to resolve their existing operational challenges. A common dilemma among the IoT solution providers and engineer-ing firms is to decide on whether to build the IoT platform in-house or outsource it to an external vendor. Platform is the fulcrum holding mul-tiple layers of the IoT infrastructure and it is as crucial as foundation laid for concrete buildings.Building an IoT platform from the ground up can be daunting and time-consuming. There are ma-ture platform players in the market who have spent years together re-fining and perfecting the platform and solution providers might lose time and money trying to replicate that in-house.Why should you go for a well-estab-lished platform and not burn fin-gers building it in-house?Play it to your strengthPlatforms have a pivotal role to play in the complete IoT framework. A research by IoT Analytics (year 2016) identified that by outsourcing the platform to an external vendor, implementation cycle gets reduced by up to 50 percent.There is no need of spending time and effort on building an IoT platform in-house, when develop-ers and solution providers can avail robust, multi-functional platforms available in the market. The advan-tage of acquiring platform from a dedicated vendor is the expertise vendor brings. Instead of investing resource on building platform which is a complex effort by itself, solution providers can concentrate on their core competency and start building customer-centric solutions quickly.IoT platform vendors have large, dedicated teams for R&D and spend a lot of time fixing bugs and iterat-ing the quality of the product, so that you don't have to. You can stay focused on your core proposition and save a lot of engineering effort, time and money.Solution providers and app de-velopers today are looking to lever-age on the upper layers of the IoT stack and this means building appli-cations within a short time with an enterprise-ready platform. Hence, choosing the right platform can help save a lot of money, reduce time to TCXO INSIGHTS
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