How do you make money and progress in IoT? Start by being ‘customer-aligned’

The first person I ran into at last week’s IoT Solutions World Congress 2018 in Barcelona was an old friend of IoT Now’s who shall remain nameless. He looked exhausted. I had arrived a few hours after him on the first day.“How’s the show going?” I asked. He pulled a face, “not much new,” he said. Well, I’ve never known him to be so wrong, says Jeremy Cowan. The next two days for the IoT Now team were filled with face-to-face meetings (digital doesn’t always cut it), smiles, photos and scribbled notes as we tried to get around every stand. It can be tempting to look at the Internet of Things (and M2M or machine-to-machine communications) as a new phenomenon. Not everyone sees it like that. In a wide-ranging chat with Hitachi Vantara, Wael Elrifai, the company’s VP for Solution Engineering – Big Data, IoT & AI, pointed out that Hitachi is a 108-year-old manufacturing business, and has had a digital presence for 60 years.