The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming product companies into service businesses. These companies are discovering that launching, managing, and expanding an IoT service comes with unique challenges. The adoption of cloud, analytics, Big Data, mobile, and social technologies compels solution providers and their partners to deliver increased business value. This pace of change shifts the landscape in terms of technology sales and implementation. Partner organizations that fail to maintain and enhance their employees' technical and sales skills will be unable to successfully apply the best technologies to match the evolving business requirements.
During a recent DIGITIMES organized Embedded Technology Forum, Tony Tsao, CEO of Global Channel Resource Corporation, said that with cloud services and different mobile apps, opportunities lie in the creation of new business designs by blurring the digital and physical worlds. As the technological revolution accelerates, consumers have completely changed how they shop, how they make purchasing decisions, and what they expect from product distributors. Differentiation between purchasing channels is introducing a series of changes.
The current channel maintains the flow from product vendors, distributors, system integrators and telecom services providers, before finally handing over to the customer. But Tsao remarked that in the future, the role of distributor will be shortened to form a path from product vendors and system integrators straight to a Managed Service Provider/Telecom operator and then to the customer. Tsao dubbed this model Channel 3.0. Managed service providers will play a notable role in the ecosystem by improving operations and cutting expenses by outsourcing day-to-day management responsibilities and functions. This can include outsourcing human resource activities, production support, and lifecycle management activities, which speed up the process flow and improve efficiency.
The Channel 3.0 concept will enable progressive changes in IoT service business models. Solution providers deliver applications from single to integrated solutions, or even massively migrate to collaborative solutions. And the system platform has been transformed from Machine-to-Machine (M2M), focusing on serving individual machines with better quality, and aggregating systems to remove redundant information already transmitted by other machines. New service models will emerge by adapting complex applications driven by open collaboration architectures, Tsao said.
GCR is a company which offers a cloud-based service platform and online marketplace to help SaaS, ISV and pre-integrated IoT solutions deploy services worldwide. GCR's solutions and services create a platform that ties up with a regional and local business operations to reduce the physical demand gap between worldwide ICT channel partners and global buyers, said Tsao.
Tony Tsao, CEO of Global Channel Resource Corporation
Photo: Digitimes
