Start Your IoT Revolution Now

**Editor’s Note: It’s not too late to register for the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, the gathering place for the technology services community, April 10-13, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.**

The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow mindshare of partners and customers alike. No surprise. Gartner forecasts that 8.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2017 – up 31 percent from 2016 – and will reach 20.4 billion by 2020.

The IoT opportunity for partners is big. In 2017 alone, businesses are expected to employ 3.1 billion connected things. Services, i.e. design, implementation and operating IoT, play a critical role in kicking the IoT market in gear.

And, there’s a lot more that partners need to know about IoT. “The Experience Area Live: IoT,” on the Jive Big Stage at next week’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas, will feature a panel discussion on the opportunities, challenges and next-gen offerings, that partners won’t want to miss.

Rick Beckers, president of CloudTech1, will be the session moderator. He’s joined by Ken Conor, vice president, sales engineering at Kore; and Tim Cook, CEO at BluLogix. We caught up with Beckers and Cook to preview their session.

Channel Partners: IoT is happening today, but many partners firms aren’t there yet. Why not?

Rick Beckers: If you look at the health-care industry, for example, IoT is very real. The channel isn’t necessarily seeing it because you have system integrators going out on their own and finding IoT solutions — versus the large carriers dropping them into their offerings.

It’s coming. It’s going to mature real fast; I want to say that I wouldn’t be surprised to see IoT begin to mature at the same time that 5G hits the world.

We’re from Detroit, which is manufacturing, so we make stuff, and IoT here equates to IIoT, the Industrial Internet of Things — or what’s being called Industry 4.0, the next era of industry in the world. What that means to us is that we’re connecting our clients’ manufacturing shop floor equipment to the front office so they can pull BI [business intelligence] data off of that equipment and see it in real time, collecting and modeling that data in any number of different ways so that they can improve their businesses so they can run more efficiently and more productively.

There’s a ton of things that IoT will be useful for. For me, IoT is … I have a sensor, a method for pulling data off of that sensor and I have a collector of the data to decide what I want to do with that data.

CP: So what should partners be doing now? What do they need to learn?

RB: Partners can learn what they should be doing to create an IoT business so they’ll be ready when …