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EXPANDING YOUR SERVICE OFFERINGS: A LOOK AT THE OPPORTUNITIES
Pump Up Your Managed Service RevenuesHere are some tips for increasing “stickiness” with your customers, differentiating your MSP, and boosting your bottom line. By Rich FreemanIf you’re like the vast majority of MSPs, you already provide endpoint management and backup and disaster recovery (BDR) services. If that’s all you offer, however, you’re missing out on a wide variety of other opportunities to increase your “stickiness” with customers, differentiate yourself from com-petitors, and (best of all) make more money. Here are brief introductions to some of the many such services you should be offering but probably aren’t.
Must-Have ServicesIn today’s era of cloud computing, mobility, and ever-lurking security threats, every MSP should be offering his or her clients all of the following top-line-boosting services.
Security With word of another data breach popping up in the media practically weekly, you’d think every channel pro would be providing security services to his or her clients by now. Yet recent research from remote monitoring and management (RMM) software maker Kaseya Ltd. found that 28 percent of MSPs don’t offer desktop security at present and 66 percent don’t offer identity and access management (IAM). If you’re among those companies, anti-virus, spam filtering, IAM, and other basic security solutions should be the very first new offerings you add to your service lineup.
Adding newer, less-familiar security solutions as well, however, can help you differentiate yourself from the competition. Numerous vendors, for ex-
ample, have begun offering “next generation,” ma-chine-learning-based solutions capable of spotting and alerting you to zero-day attacks that traditional anti-virus solutions often miss.
Email and data encryption solutions are two further ways to boost the value—and hence price—of your service packages while better protecting your cus-tomers. Such systems ensure that sensitive data is il-legible to outsiders both in transit across the internet and at rest in on-premises or off-premises servers and solutions, including Microsoft Office 365.
Even the best security software is powerless to pro-tect your clients from their own bad habits, howev-er, so if you don’t offer security awareness training at present you’re not only missing out on an incre-mental revenue source but neglecting the weakest link in the security chain as well. A wide range of third-party vendors can provide safe computing courseware if you don’t have the time or expertise to develop it yourself.
Mobile Device Management Smartphones and tablets are every bit as central to business computing as desktops and notebooks. As a result, mobile device management (MDM) has become not only an additional revenue opportunity but a table-stakes capability that MSPs increasingly must offer to remain competitive.
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28 percent of MSPs don’t offer desktop security at present and 66 percent don’t offer identity and access management.
Adding an MDM service usually requires an up-front investment in software, however. Many RMM systems come with some MDM functionality now, but specialized solutions with more extensive func-tionality are worth considering as well. At an abso-lute minimum, be sure you’re equipped to add and remove devices from the network, change pins, and lock or wipe devices that have been lost or stolen.
Finally, plan to invest some otherwise billable hours in developing and documenting repeatable MDM proce-dures, and then train your techs to execute them.
Email Continuity Email remains an indispensable business tool that no SMB can afford to be without for long, so few business owners will object to paying you a little extra each month for the peace of mind that comes from knowing they’ll almost always have access to it. Email continuity services ensure that clients can quickly and easily get back to sending and receiving messages if—or rather when—their on-site or cloud-based email system goes down. Most such offerings require little ongoing man-agement or expertise, and are reasonably priced.
Cloud-to-Cloud Backup Sure, you’re backing up your clients’ on-premises data, but what about the information in all those software-as-a-service solutions they’re probably using? If a careless end user accidentally deletes or overwrites something important in one of those systems, you may be in for weeks of waiting before the vendor gets around to restoring that data, if it even has a copy archived. And if one of your cus-tomers receives an e-discovery request involving an ex-employee whose account you removed for that customer two years ago, you’re probably out of luck altogether. Cloud-to-cloud backup services protect businesses from nightmare scenarios like that, and like email continuity solutions they’re relatively easy to set up and maintain.
Communication and Collaboration ServicesOnce you’ve got all the essential network, appli-cation, and endpoint management services cov-
ered, look for opportunities to provide optional but extremely valuable additional services in areas such as communication and collaboration.
File Share and Sync Most knowledge workers use three or more differ-ent devices these days. File share and sync solu-tions give them access to their documents from all of them, while enabling employees to collaborate more easily with colleagues, customers, and busi-ness partners. Surprisingly few MSPs offer such systems to their clients at present, giving MSPs who do a chance to set themselves apart from their peers. Just be certain to utilize a business-grade, enterprise file share and sync product with state-of-the-art security safeguards rather than one of the more familiar and popular consumer services.
VoIP/Hosted PBX Digital telephony solutions typically pay decent margins and are a great tool for defending your customer accounts from the steadily growing pop-ulation of telecommunications specialists offering IT management services. To succeed in VoIP and hosted PBX, however, you’ll need to:
• Learn how to support such services and explain them to customers in easily understood terms. Many VoIP and hosted PBX vendors offer train-ing courses that can assist in both areas.
• Make certain that the customers you sell these solutions to have fast, reliable networks and internet connections.
• Ensure that you and your vendors have strong, 24/7 support processes in place. Businesses that can handle a four-hour wait for support when a server goes down are often unwilling to wait 30 minutes for help when their phones become unavailable.
Any MSP offering Office 365 to clients should also take a close look at Microsoft’s affordably priced E5 plan, which includes hosted PBX functionality and access to PSTN calling plans, as it can be an easy sell to existing Office 365 users who are unhappy with their current phone provider. The E5 plan lacks a built-in auto attendant and other features that
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THANK YOU
some businesses can’t live without, however, so be careful about which clients you recommend it to.
SharePoint Solutions Most Office 365 editions, including the E5 plan, come with access rights to Microsoft’s SharePoint Online solution. More often than not, however, those access rights go largely or completely unused. Creating, im-plementing, and supporting SharePoint Online solu-tions significantly increases both your Office 365-re-lated income and your customers’ Office 365 ROI.
Development and integration services are generally one-time professional service opportunities paying 30 to 50 percent margins. Be forewarned, however: They’re not cheap or easy to deliver. Teaching your existing staff to build and deploy SharePoint solutions requires significant training investments, and hiring people with existing SharePoint skills can be expensive.
Supporting SharePoint solutions, though less profit-able than building custom applications, imposes fewer up-front training and staffing costs. Unless you’re well versed in SharePoint, however, you’ll probably want to route all but the simplest tier-one support queries directly to Microsoft and tell your clients about that policy in advance, so they know exactly what you will and won’t be handling for them yourself.
Easy Add-On OpportunitiesCompared with SharePoint solutions, analog tele-communications services and internet connectiv-ity are low-overhead opportunities that too many MSPs ignore.
Telecommunications Services Every SMB needs phones. Reselling telecom ser-vices is a relatively simple way to help your clients meet that requirement while earning modest but steady recurring fees.
Partnering with a qualified master agent is essen-tial, however. The right telecommunications partner can handle tier-two and -three support issues, train your staff, provide pre-sales technical assistance, manage contracts, and more.
Internet Connectivity Most MSPs must spend time learning about tele-com services before they feel confident talking about them with clients. Internet connectivity, on the other hand, is something you probably know all about already, and it can provide a similar stream of recurring monthly revenue.
As with phone services, partnering with a good master agent is key. Look in particular for firms with the knowledge and resources to tackle all but the most elemental support issues swiftly and reliably.
Beyond the Basics for the Long TermThinking beyond the basic managed services that every MSP offers is a powerful strategy for augmenting your top line while safeguarding your hard-earned customer relationships from cut-rate competitors. By gradually adding some of the offerings discussed to your service roster, you can position yourself for long-term growth without breaking the bank on startup costs.
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Thanks to the following for input to this story:
Stephen Hall, CEO District Computers LLC www.districtcomputers.com
Ro Kolakowski, Founder 6th Street Consulting www.6sc.com
Josh Liberman, President Net Sciences Inc. www.netsciences.com
Ed Mana, Founder Technology on Demand www.technologyondemand.com
Peter Melby, President Greystone Technology www.greystonetech.com
Ronnie Parisella, Co-Founder MSP Foundry www.mspfoundry.com
Zack Schuler, Founder and CEO Ninjio LLC www.ninjio.com
Dave Seibert, CIO IT Innovators Inc. www.itinnovators.com
MJ Shoer, CTO Internet & Telephone LLC www.itllc.net
Erick Simpson, Co-Founder, Vice President, and CIO SPC Online International Inc. www.spc-intl.com
Paul Smith, Partner Datasmith Networks Solutions www.datasmithnetworks.com
Vince Tinnirello, CEO Anchor Network Solutions Inc. www.anchornetworksolutions.com
What do MSPs and IT VARs have in common with managed print services (MPS) providers? More and more, according to industry experts—and we’re not just talking about the three letters in the acronym.
From a business perspective, imaging/print and IT services were “two very different worlds, with not a lot of commonality,” says Mike Lamothe, pres-ident at Office Docu-ment Consulting Inc., of Oakville, Ontario, and a member of the CompTIA Managed Print Community executive council. La-mothe is also a mem-ber of the Managed Print Services Association (MPSA) standards and best practices committee.
“In the past, copier dealers were really ‘feet on the street’ service technicians,” says Lamothe. “From the MSP side they didn’t have that; they [were] very used to supporting [customers] remotely, so there was a reluctance to get into print. But as the industries have evolved, the MSP can get that support and outsourcing is becoming bigger.”
Until the last decade, output devices “didn’t have a lot of functionality,” says Harry B. Hecht, a business coach and consultant based in Orlando, Fla., and also a member of the standards and best practices committee of the MPSA. “Once they became networked they became portals for information and integrated [into] the network and
infrastructure. They became not just devices but software and desktop devices, which required management and assessment. Now they’re really part of the workflow vs. just output.”
“The office equipment channel has gone from transactional to contractual to a full managed ser-vices sale,” says Brendan Morse, senior research analyst at InfoTrends. “It’s a logical evolution.”
The MPS Market OpportunityManaged print services, according to Gartner’s defi-nition, are “services offered by an external provider to optimize or manage a company’s document output,” including hardware, parts, and supplies, as well as understanding how the fleet is being used and troubleshooting problems. Analysis and research firm Transparency Market Research seg-ments the MPS market into printer/copier manufac-turers and channel partner/core MPS providers.
The research firm’s report, Managed Print Ser-vices Market—Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016-2024, says the MPS market is expected to reach $94.97 billion in revenue by 2024, rising from $26.18 billion in 2015. The market is estimated to expand
Adding Managed Print to Your MSP PracticeToday you can monitor and manage networked printers and copiers as you do with IT gear, or you can partner with a managed print specialist or third-party service provider. By Colleen Frye
“The office equipment channel has gone from transactional to contractual to a full man-aged services sale. It’s a logical evolution.”BRENDAN MORSE, Senior Research Analyst, InfoTrends
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at a CAGR of 14.8 percent during the forecast period from 2016 to 2024, according to the report. Moreover, the research indicates that the small to midsize enterprise (SME) segment of the MPS market will grow faster than large enterprises in the adoption of MPS during that same period.
The research also identifies some of the key com-panies operating in the MPS market: Xerox Corp., ARC Document Solutions Inc., Ricoh Company Ltd., Lexmark Corp., Canon Inc., Konica Minolta Inc., KYOCERA Corp., Toshiba Corp., HP Devel-opment L.P., and Print Audit. These key players, notes the report, are focusing on increasing their number of channel partners and expanding geo-graphically to boost their market presence.
A trend in the managed print market “favors the channel quite dramatically over direct providers,” says Morse. “There’s a shift toward a true services engagement versus selling hardware, and a trend toward managing existing fleets versus replacing with new ones” that a specific MPS provider may sell.
And, according to IDC, managed print services con-tracts continue to grow, contributing to shipments of printers/copiers in the first quarter of 2016.
Market ConvergenceThe conversation about MPS and MSP conver-gence started a few years ago, because with net-work-connected printers “IT has this nasty thing on their plates called printers and copiers,” says Lamothe. “They said, ‘Take it away.’”
One trend driving the business models closer together is the availability of tools and infrastruc-ture that allow for more remote monitoring and management of printers and copiers, says Lamothe, which is more akin to what MSPs do. Another op-tion, he says, is MSPs can contract with third-party providers that will send someone else on-site for service calls. “Gone are the days when we have to walk around to see and diagnose printers,” he adds.
Consequently, “I’m getting more calls from IT VARs and MSPs wanting to understand and utilize
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There are four primary components to MPS, according to Brian Dawson, sales and marketing director for Boise, Idaho-based PrintTracker LLC, whose solution automatically collects meter, ton-er, and service information. Dawson is also on the MPSA’s standards and best practices committee.
Supply/fulfillment.
Supply/fulfillment with break-fix service. “This could be as basic as a dealer providing service to its own clients or hiring subcontractors that provide service to national accounts,” Dawson explains.
The addition of equipment man-agement to the above, which involves the use of “some type of col-lection tool gathering data. So some-one in the dealer organization uses the data to maximize/improve their end customer’s printing experience.”
The addition of other services such as in-depth assessments or rules-based printing, “where someone might send a job to a printer in the of- fice, and a message comes up that it would be more efficient if they sent it to the duplex printer down the hall. That’s a very complex portfolio of MPS.”
Within each category there is a list of best prac-tices, says Dawson. The MPSA has put together a list for the first component, supply/fulfillment, which is available to members, and is working on the second component.
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our software,” says Lamothe. His company has developed DOC Assess, a TCO assessment tool with fleet-virtualization provided in the cloud; fleet CAPture, rebranded FM Audit in the cloud; and DOC fleet, a back-office, cost-per-copy leas-ing tool that automates the capture of data and financial process through to billing.
“Over the last year or so MSPs have been looking at print as a way to add on to their service offer-ings,” says Aldo Spensieri, vice president, MPS Solutions, at Clover Imaging Group, a global imag-ing company based in Hoffman Estates, Ill.
According to a recent CompTIA study, 65 percent of MSPs offer managed print, with 32 percent planning to. Compare that to the top MSP offerings: security (firewall management), 74 percent; server manage-ment, 74 percent; storage, 72 percent; and network management, 71 percent.
“Print evolved is MPS, where customers out-source the management of the print environ-ment,” says Spensieri. “Until a while ago MSPs didn’t want to touch print. They didn’t understand it and it may break. The MPS [provider] didn’t understand IT and networking. We’ve seen acqui-sitions from both sides.”
Clover’s solution, Axess MPS, is billed as a com-prehensive, fully integrated suite of software and services for delivering managed print. “Clover has found a way to offer print on a per-seat basis, which is what MSPs are used to selling,” explains Spensieri. The MSP, he says, takes care of the billing, “and we take care of the rest. It’s a nice, elegant way for an MSP to offer print and addi-tional services. In a lot of cases the end customer is happy to deal with one provider.”
On the other hand, says Morse, it’s easier for an
MPS business to get into managed IT than it is for an MSP to get into managed print. “It’s really more like managed print providers are entering managed IT services. The average office equip-ment dealer has over a million dollars in free cash flow, so they can go and buy an MSP. A lot of smaller office equipment dealers tried to get into managed print and found it difficult, because they need to go into the field, replace toner, service devices. It’s quite a bit of work. Then with man-aged IT [as a business model] it’s even harder.”
Mark Moreno, owner of C&M Support Services & Consulting Inc., an MSP in Mishawaka, Ind., says he did investigate adding managed print through Oki Data Americas, “but I think I was ahead of the curve. I couldn’t get buy-in with my custom-er base.” In addition, he says, there are “some Herculean things to overcome.” One is the fact that printers are commodities that users buy at big box stores and want to put on the network. “That’s a pain point,” says Moreno. Second is the need to have personnel who can go on-site for servicing, he adds.
For MSPs, Morse says, a partnering strategy might be the best way. “The MPS program is much harder than building an MSP. Managed print is a very different business.”
IT companies that are small—say, three to four people—don’t have a field force; they’re all help desk focused,” says Hecht. “Imaging people have field people and are more invested on-site. It’s a nice approach when you marry the two together.”
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The MSP takes care of the billing, “and we take care of the rest. It’s a nice, elegant way for an MSP to offer print and additional services.”Aldo Spensieri, Vice President, MPS Solutions, Clover Imaging Group
Practical Advice For IT integrators and VARs interested in MPS, Hecht says they first “need to get closer to customers from a sales and marketing standpoint. So go out and explore additional services and understand their business more; survey those customers. The first step is to gain access to additional opportuni-ty. So how many devices might be associated with desktop services? Years ago there was a printer for every desktop, and it’s maybe half of that now. Most customers are looking to get rid of the redundancy of these devices.” Once MSPs have that information, they can decide the best route to managed print, whether that’s through partnership, using third-party services, or developing an in-house practice, he says.
Vertical markets are a key aspect of MPS, says Morse. Some industries have page volumes that are much larger than others, such as healthcare, financial services, government/public administration, and legal. “If you have a preexisting specialization in any of those markets you might consider going into managed print.”
According to Spensieri, “All customers that have 20 [or more] printers, even at the smaller SMB level, are looking for ways to cut costs. Definitely managed print is a way to cut down on cost. It’s easier to pro-vide new services to existing customers, so that’s low hanging fruit for the IT world.”
However, he cautions, mistakes in the early days of managed print were made because imaging pro-viders “went in not quite knowing what they were doing. Let Clover or other folks in the industry help you so you don’t lose money.”
Spensieri also notes that the MPSA will soon launch best practices for doing an assessment. “That’s im-portant. Before you price an engagement you have to understand the fleet environment, so the art of assessment is essential.”
Sums up Lamothe: “At a recent CompTIA meeting in Canada, there was more chatter [about managed print] now than five years ago. They [MSPs/VARs] now want help. They know tools are out there, and they want help to put the pieces together.”
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COMPTIA Managed Print Services. www.channelpronetwork.com/Z4M
Managed Print Services Association Everything about the MSPA. www.yourmpsa.org
Transparency Market Research The managed print services (MPS) market. www.channelpronetwork.com
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Channel pros with a handle on the essentials of the digital signage marketplace—and a flair for interior design—can find increasing business opportunities in the field of “techorating.”
According to Alan C. Brawn, principal of Vista, Ca-lif.-based Brawn Consulting LLC, an AV and digital signage consultancy, techorating is a term that refers to the incorporation of technology into the overall decorative theme of a space. At its most basic, “It is the use of technologies as part of the design of an environment, beyond what the tech-nologies actually do,” Brawn says.
Flat-panel display, projection, audio, and interactive technologies have been invading the commercial market for many years, notes Brawn, “and techorat-ing is all about integrating them into a space so that they become not only a method of communicating, but also part of the aesthetics.”
Examples of techorating abound. They include digi-tal displays, set up perhaps as flat-panel video walls in a corporate headquarters to communicate the story of the company to those who enter the space. Techorating is increasingly common in the retail arena, in the form of digital video displays of widely varying shapes and sizes that convey information on everything from how to use a particular product to what’s on the dinner menu.
“Techorating has become much more mainstream as people strive to ‘think outside of the rectangle,’ and differentiate their space from others, or to help cre-ate a better, more inviting environment,” says Brawn.
Techorating tracks the digital signage market. And
currently, “Corporate communications and retail are among the hottest industry sectors for digital signage,” says Richard Ventura, vice president of business development and solutions at NEC Display Solutions of America, an Itasca, Ill.-based global de-signer/provider of monitors, multimedia and digital cinema projectors, and integrated display solutions.
Growth in the use of interactive digital signage is a major driver in these market sectors. Ventura cites several important technologies in this regard: RFID (radio frequency identification); iBeacon, an Apple standard enabling the delivery of micro-level (i.e., inside a store), location-based information and services to wireless devices; and augmented reality apps, which supplement real-time environments with digital information.
“In addition, direct-view LED with finer pixel pitches and lampless projectors will pave the way for larger and more explosive video walls and canvasses,” Ventura says, adding, “The increased application of 3-D projection mapping will drive exciting installa-tions in [numerous] vertical markets.”
Channel pros looking for a piece of the techorating market need to be well-versed in the fundamentals of digital signage technologies, according to Brawn; he notes that a subsidiary of Brawn Consulting, DSEG (Dig-ital Signage Experts Group), provides industry educa-tion and certification for digital signage professionals.
It also helps for your company to have some cre-ative firepower. “Beyond the basic design and integration skills,” says Brawn, “there must be a cre-ative and visionary capability inside the company.”
‘Techorating’ Opps on the Rise for the ChannelGet a handle on the essentials of digital signage to take advantage of this emerging trend. By Martin Sinderman
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Luis Alvarez has been delivering Internet of Things solutions to his clients for almost as long as he’s been in business. He just wasn’t aware that’s what he was doing until recently.
“We’re in a very heavily agricultural area,” explains Al-varez, who is president and CEO of Alvarez Technology Group Inc., a Salinas, Calif.-based integrator and MSP firm he founded in 2001. About a third of the compa-nies he supports grow, ship, or process food in one way or another, and Alvarez has been helping them use remote sensors to monitor soil conditions and track temperatures inside refrigerated trucks for years.
“In ag, they’ve been innovating in what we call IoT for a long, long time,” says Alvarez, who adds that he just didn’t know to call it IoT back then.
He knows now, however. Worldwide Internet of Things services spending was expected to total $235 billion in 2016, according to Gartner Inc., which also expected the global installed base of IoT end-points to skyrocket from nearly 6.4 billion in 2016 to roughly 20.8 billion in 2020. That explosive growth spells opportunity for channel pros who build, sell, and maintain Internet of Things solutions.
Thanks to the increasing sophistication of IoT gate-ways, development platforms, and other technol-ogies, moreover, getting in on that action doesn’t have to be as hard as you might think. Let these four recipes for IoT solutions you can cook up and sell today show you the way.
Recipe 1: Trucking Company DashboardAccording to Alvarez, businesses that get agricultural goods to market are longtime users of sensors for monitoring truck locations. “Truck tracking technolo-
gy has been around for 20 years,” he says. “It has just now become much cheaper and more efficient.”
That realization helped Alvarez spot an opportuni-ty to do more with IoT technology than keep tabs on truck locations. Transportation laws limit the number of hours drivers can work in a given shift, and how much rest they must get between shifts. Determining which driver and which truck should handle which delivery requires a combination of vehicle, booking, routing, and HR data stored in separate operational systems. “There was no clear way other than Excel spreadsheets to track all of that stuff,” Alvarez says.
So he created one, a cloud-based dashboard solution that imports data from truck-based sen-sors and merges it with all of the other information trucking managers need to get the most work done, legally, with the least number of drivers. “By being able to correlate where the trucks are to when the drivers have started work, and how many more hours of work they have left to them, they can be much more efficient about who they assign to dif-ferent routes,” Alvarez notes.
Building the first instance of the solution took more than 200 hours of work, but much of that effort could be repurposed for additional clients in the future. The availability of industry-specific IoT transportation solutions made importing data from vehicles easier than expected too. “It’s not as complicated as we thought it was going to be,” Alvarez says, adding that the toughest part of the development process was stitching the truck-based application together with the rest of the solution. “One thing that a lot of these IoT solutions still lack is any sort of integration,” he explains.
The Joy of Cooking IoTYou too can be a master Internet of Things chef with the help of these recipes for solutions that any channel pro can start cooking up today. By Rich Freeman
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• An internet-enabled telematics solution for tracking truck locations
• Cellular connectivity to get data from the trucks into the cloud
• A public or private cloud in which to store the data and host the dashboard. Alvarez uses Microsoft Azure for that purpose.
• Reporting software capable of combining and analyzing information from the telemat-ics application and the customer’s various business systems. Alvarez employs Micro-soft’s Power BI in this role.
Preparation Summary1. Meet with the client to assess specific requirements. Different truckers will want to monitor different metrics in different ways.
2. Select a telematics vendor and research in-terfacing with their software. “Standards aren’t universal, and they’re kind of tweaked by each manufacturer to meet their specific need,” Alvarez warns. “At times, those conversations can get very laborious.”
3. Integrate your chosen cloud environment and analytics tool with the telematics system and your client’s operational solutions.
4. Use the analytics tool’s data visualization fea-tures to create the graphical dashboard interface.
Additional Serving SuggestionsTransportation companies aren’t the only business-es in need of a dashboard. Alvarez also works with manufacturers eager to correlate information from machinery on their production line with ordering records in their ERP application, for example. The basic structure of the solution he created for truck-ing clients can easily adapt to other uses like that as well. “With some tweaks, you can do this in a number of different industries,” Alvarez notes.
Recipe 2 Asset Tracking SolutionTrucking solutions like Alvarez’s are near and dear to Brad Taylor as well. Omnitracs LLC, the Dallas-based vendor he serves as vice president of data and IoT solutions, has been offering up what it sometimes calls “Interstate of Things” systems to vehicle operators for almost 30 years. That expertise turns out to have uses well beyond fleet management, however. “Keeping track of assets is not just about vehicles and trailers,” Taylor observes. “It’s about all kinds of assets.”
Indeed, pretty much any company that rents equip-ment to other companies needs to know where its property is located and how much revenue it’s bringing in. “Rather than selling somebody a trash can, they may put a trash can on-site for some period of time and charge the customer for that,” Taylor says. “That’s an asset that can be tracked and more effectively utilized.”
Creating solutions that automate that work is get-ting simpler all the time too, he adds, because the sensors involved continue to get smaller, cheaper, and easier to connect with back-end systems. “It becomes faster every year,” Taylor says of the de-velopment and integration process.
• Wireless asset tags equipped with RFID or Bluetooth connectivity
• IoT gateways for connecting the tags to the rest of the solution
• Connectivity between the gateways and the cloud. Omnitracs clients use everything from cellular net-works to Wi-Fi to satellites for this purpose.
• An IoT platform that can collect and process data from the asset tags. Omnitracs offers one with specialized functionality for solutions like this, but more generic systems such as AWS IoT, from Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure IoT Suite are options as well.
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Preparation Summary1. Affix the tags to the assets and deploy the gate-ways at the work sites where those assets are used.
2. Integrate the tags, gateways, and Internet of Things platform. Though simpler than it used to be, this process can still be time-consuming.
3. Develop the front-end interface and underlying business logic that turns data from the tags into ac-tionable intelligence. There will be plenty of effort here, too, the first time you do it, but you can reuse most of what you build more quickly with future clients.
Additional Serving SuggestionsBuilding and deploying asset tracking solutions can yield rich project fees. Keeping those systems up and running can generate additional income as well, however. “This is a nice thing for the channel partners,” Taylor says. “If they get into a managed service, there’s recurring revenue associated with IoT normally, as well as one-time sales.”
Recipe 3 Smart Building SolutionAccording to the federal government, owners of commercial and industrial buildings spend $400 billion annually on power—and waste 30 percent of it on inefficient heating, cooling, and lighting.
Big facility operators trim energy consumption with the help of complex building management systems far too expensive to make economic sense for the millions of smaller structures that also struggle with rising electrical bills. Internet of Things technology, however, can deliver comparable functionality to such buildings at a fraction of the cost.
For example, using technology from Intel, Micro-soft, and Oakland, Calif.-based CANDI Controls Inc., WinWire Technologies Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., delivers “smart building” solutions that collect data from sensors, upload it to the cloud, scrutinize it for opportunities to tweak thermostat settings and shut off unneeded lights, and then remotely and auto-matically act on that analysis to cut energy usage.
Those solutions are affordable too. A typical build-ing management system costs $2.30 per square foot on average, according to WinWire CEO Ashu Goel. His company’s systems, by contrast, aver-age just 52 cents a square foot and cut power use enough to pay for themselves within a year or two. “You get relatively fast ROI,” says Goel.
• Sensors capable of collecting information from lighting and HVAC systems
• Software like CANDI PowerTools that col-lects sensor data, normalizes it, and feeds it to IoT gateways
• IoT gateways like those included in Intel’s Building Management Platform
• A cloud-based IoT environment, such as Microsoft Azure IoT Hub
• Software to analyze sensor data in the cloud and feed instructions back down to lighting and HVAC systems in the building
Preparation Summary1. Conduct an energy audit to establish baseline power consumption metrics.
2. Perform an infrastructure analysis to determine how many sensors, gateways, and the like your client requires.
3. Install and connect the sensors, gateways, cloud resources, and application software.
4. Start collecting and analyzing data. It’ll be a few weeks or months before you have enough to identify efficiency-boosting opportunities with confidence.
5. Begin acting on those opportunities by sending instructions from the application software back down to the lighting and HVAC systems.
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Additional Serving Suggestions Well-made smart building solutions can do more than optimize power usage. Utilizing the same locally in-stalled sensors, they can also lower overhead by col-lecting preventive equipment maintenance data and boosting occupant productivity by powering “smart workspaces” that automatically align lighting and tem-peratures with an individual employee’s preferences.
Recipe 4 Retail Shopper Tracking SolutionAs it happens, smart building solutions were one of HARMAN International’s first forays into the Internet of Things too. Eventually, however, the Stamford, Conn.-based firm realized that the same technology it uses to track people in office spaces can track people in stores as well.
And that kind of information is as good as gold for retail-ers. How do different floor layouts impact traffic flows and buying patterns? Does moving a product display increase or decrease “dwell times” in front of it? How much more likely are consumers to make a purchase if an employee approaches them to offer help? IoT-en-abled shopper tracking solutions can provide hard, actionable answers to those and similar questions.
Once you get the hang of it, moreover, they’re sur-prisingly easy to implement, according to Andrew Till, HARMAN’s vice president of technology, partnerships, and new solutions. “I would say you could deploy these types of solutions in weeks if not days,” he says.
• Beacons for collecting anonymous location data from smartphones and other mobile devices
• Sensors for measuring nearby temperatures. That’s data you can use to assess how many people are standing in a given part of a store.
• IoT gateways
• A cloud-based IoT environment
• Analytics software for identifying actionable patterns in beacon and sensor data
Preparation Summary1. Conduct a half-day workshop with the client to determine what kinds of questions they need answered.
2. Calculate how many beacons, sensors, and gateways you need to gather the data required to answer those questions.
3. Install the hardware and connect it to the cloud-based IoT system of your choice.
4. Write the algorithms and reports that will analyze shopper tracking data. According to Till, this is usu-ally the longest and hardest step. “Data science can be a very confusing area,” he observes.
Additional Serving SuggestionsOnce you’ve gotten good at deploying stand-alone Internet of Things solutions at retail sites you can start integrating them with other applications to glean more sophisticated insights. Combining vol-untarily supplied information from a specific buyer’s smartphone with location data and point-of-sale records, for example, can help store owners break down sales patterns by age, gender, time of day, and other important variables.
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