We speak to a lot of companies, particularly at the upper-end of the mid-market and at enterprise levels, who are exploring the possibility of building their own combined machine learning and IoT platform.
Whilst it’s great that they’re exploring how Industry 4.0 technology can be used in their organisation to transform or enhance individual functions, it’s (exclusively) always a very misguided approach and our advice is always the same: don’t.
Of course we would say that, (we do have a vested interest in it), but there’s a number of truths that are undeniable. Before we list them, it’s worth noting a well quoted statistic:
“Seventy-five percent of IoT projects fail because they’re not concentrating on the right data, there’s not enough IoT expertise, are too expensive and time consuming to deploy, or that they’re poorly focused and not tackling fundamental business problems.”
Cisco, The Journey to IoT Value: Challenges, Breakthroughs, and Best Practices.
If that’s not enough to stop you then here are 6 truths to consider when thinking about building your own IoT platform:
- Truth 1: it will cost you significantly more. The cost of developing your own platform in the first year will likely be more than if you adopt and run Rayven for over a decade – and that doesn’t even consider the time savings involved or the ongoing support, dev and maintenance costs you would face.
- Truth 2: you’ll solve the tech challenge, not the Data Science one. Rubbish in – rubbish out: clean, reliable, real-time data is critical to delivering results. This is why creating a real-time single source of truth for your data and an expert understanding of Machine Learning is just as critical as building Industry 4.0 functionality.
- Truth 3: you don’t have the internal skills required. Unless you have a team of experts in IT Infrastructure, Data Science, IoT, UX, Security, Machine Learning and AI working together to create the solution, you do not have the required in-house expertise to create (and run) your own platform.
- Truth 4: you will approach the project in the wrong way. Trying to solve a technology problem by adding Industry 4.0 technology to what’s already there, rather than looking at it from the perspective of what the business problem is that you’re trying to achieve with it, will lead to certain project failure.
- Truth 5: what you build won’t be future-proofed. The Rayven platform is future-proofed SaaS. From new security threats, third party updates and new pieces of technology that are yet to be adopted, the Rayven platform is guaranteed to be maintained, updated and interoperable with them.
- Truth 6: the results won’t be anywhere near as good. You wouldn’t build an internal CRM or ERP platform – you’d buy Salesforce, SAP or similar. The reasons for this are obvious: years of expert development have gone into it and whatever you build won’t be as good or have longevity – this is no different.
If you still think you could do better and that you want to build your own platform, then do go ahead - we’ll speak to your business in 2 years when there is a strategic rethink or they’ve hired your successor.
Want to explore the use of data science, AI, IoT or compete Industry 4.0 transformation at your organisation? Speak to us today and explore what our world-leading integrated data, AI + IoT platform can do for you.