There is a tacit distinction between IoT companies and industrial automation companies. The distinction is often split between sensing and action. IIoT companies can, and do, build automation layers. We build rugged industrial automation tools for extreme environments too.
The boss once said, when discussing the Big Boys: “They do cars, we do carting.” The analogy was slick. It addressed scope and complexity, but also size, bulk and environmental operating conditions.
Bulky Behemoths
Enterprise level sales carry fixed costs per deal; named account managers, solution architects, pre-sales engineering, a bid or proposal process built for seven-figure contracts. Most IoT companies are not competing at this price. We’re not underpricing. We’re operating below their attention floor.
If we take Siemens as an example; a 150 year old German company which covers the complete spectrum of industrial, civil engineering and manufacturing. They come at it from the side of programmable logic, SCADA, and electrical installations. This is a behemoth. They’ve literally been doing this stuff for 100 years. Size wins, or does it?
The deployment model of these monster companies is a good fit for other big players. The logic is linear; Salesforce CRM fits big corporate clients, because it has “all the functionality we will ever need.” The bulk bets on standardization reducing risk. But,… a famous Google program saved a fortune by binning massive overkill. They used their own free tools. They didn’t need “all you can eat,” just enough to fill gaps in reporting. Client complaints: Zero.
The pilot program problem
Utilities, especially smaller or municipal ones, want to prove it on 50 units before committing to 5,000. That’s rational buyer behavior. It’s close to irrational for Siemens to service, because a 50 unit pilot costs them almost the same sales and engineering overhead as a 50,000 unit deal. A pilot breaks the economics on both sides of their business at once; the sales side and the delivery side.
A pilot is small in revenue but not small in process. Even if a pilot could theoretically lead to a 5,000 unit rollout later, that’s a future quarter’s revenue for a different sales cycle, maybe a different rep. The account team is judged on this quarter, this deal. A pilot is asking them to spend fixed-cost effort now for a payoff that isn’t theirs to bank.
Retrofit vs. greenfield
New infrastructure builds want the big certified name because there’s no legacy mess to navigate. The risk profile favors “nobody gets fired for buying Siemens.” Retrofit jobs; bolting monitoring onto infrastructure that’s decades old, undocumented, non-standard, is where the big boy playbook (rip out, replace with certified system) becomes expensive and disruptive. This is engineering unobtainium at scale.
The standardization of risk
Our bet is the opposite: That variance itself is where the value is. Every plot of land, every 40-year-old pipe network, every municipality’s weird procurement cycle is a special case. Instead of treating this as noise to be engineered away, we treat it as the operational environment.
Dinosaurs can’t dance
Dinosaurs didn’t die because they were bad at being dinosaurs. They died because the environment made their size advantage disappear. We’re actually a smaller organism that extends its life and vitality. More like a cleaner fish, than a mammal waiting it out, in hidden nooks and crannies.
Siemens’ problem is that its resource requirement prices it out of smaller deployments. Risk profiling leverages it out of pilots. In more agile terrain, we’re their reconnaissance element. That’s not competition. That’s each company making the other’s model work better; handing them a proven, de-risked, scaled-up opportunity after validating viability.
