Cunliffe stated,"New trends in any market place are a key piece to building the strategy for your business. For distributors there is no difference. The IoT and the new markets being delivered through it, is already driving new revenues from existing customers for the distributor.
Whether the distributors are looking at voice, data or mobile products there is a growing requirement for IoT products and solutions as part of the new distribution portfolio.
What is causing this requirement? Well, the IoT is prevalent across many sectors and the distributors are also prevalent across many sectors, therefore you start to see the requirements for IoT cross over between the distributor and its existing clients. For example, we are seeing one of our largest clients investing in making sure they share the message of IoT trends and capability in their own marketing collateral. They have even started building their own solutions so that their partners can buy hardware / completed solutions directly from them.
One such product is a flow meter designed to accurately measure water and other liquid consumption. This has been used in the pub industry to measure the number of pints and half pints poured versus what has actually been ordered. Currently the pub owner can only measure consumption based on the number of kegs ordered and used rather than accurately tracking this via the POS system. With the new system in place there are several areas that can now be improved on because of the accuracy and data generated by the IoT Solution.
This doesn’t just lend itself to a distributor now being able to look at increasing their portfolio to include flow meters but also increase the number of M2M enabled SIMs they can sell. We also start to see auxiliary products being derived from this particular product in the case of smart sprinklers and water monitoring services that will becoming more prevalent with the deregulation of water in the UK.
Telecoms resellers already sell to many customers that will ask for and require IoT solutions and products. The key thing for the distributors is to support these Resellers in purchasing the products from them rather than a competitor. New trends like the IoT should become part of the distribution strategy and portfolio so that they can capitalise on new revenues from existing customers."