From Lantronix: "Top 3 Ways to Reduce Risk & Complexity of your IoT Projects"

Part 2 – Innovating the Product Development Process of IoT projects

Innovation is the catalyst for growth and productivity. Apple innovator Steve Jobs even said it himself: “It’s the only way to win. “But innovation in the age of the Internet of Things can be difficult considering the multiple moving parts of IoT Projects. Factors like network connectivity and device life cycle management are critical components to bringing a full IoT solution to market. If your goal is to launch a product that’s truly differentiated and cutting-edge in a short amount of time, two things need to happen:

• First, you must be realistic about the capabilities of your organization. Time is money and you will end up wasting both if your team bites off more than it can chew.
• Second, you need to identify the features and capabilities of your IoT Projects that you can offload to a component, software or third party. For example, if you need to deliver enterprise security but don’t have a dedicated engineer to write a security stack, it makes practical financial sense to source those capabilities from a pre-integrated component.

After understanding what you bring to the table versus what you need help with, you can confidently scope your IoT projects and focus on value creation.

As a leading component supplier for IoT solutions, our goal is to provide OEMs with pre-integrated components that offload complexity in your IoT projects, so you can focus on innovation. This installment of the XPort EDGE blog series will discuss how the XPort EDGE will allow you to accelerate your solution’s time to market by innovating the product development process.

XPort EDGE Accelerates Innovation in IoT Projects

Let’s drill down to the bedrock of what innovation means at the product development level. In a business context, this means coming up with entirely new ways of executing activities, e.g., designing products, or a go to market strategy. Retooling these processes have been key to some of the greatest success stories in business history. Real world examples include Wal-Mart, Toyota, Zara, and Dell, who all have radically changed their operations, leading to shorter development times, faster time to market and lower operating costs –translating to lower prices!

XPort EDGE and Operational Innovation Can Reduce Product Risk

At its core, operational innovation demands we look at areas like product development differently. To begin, let’s review three key factors operational innovators can incorporate into their IoT projects using the XPort EDGE:

• Quicker Time to Market

Your success in the IIoT world is predicated on developing cutting-edge products in a set timeframe to ensure faster time to market. The goals are simple, be the first or fastest to market and reap the rewards. The easier and smartest way to slash time to market is to procure production-ready components that will shorten your development & integration. But the XPort EDGE goes further than that by doing the “heavy lifting” of your IoT projects by providing expensive hardware certifications and software testing against industrial standards.

• Enterprise-Class Security

No designer would develop a product without enterprise-class security features. But developing a security stack and staying ahead of all the changing requirements and protocols takes considerable time and effort. With XPort EDGE, you don’t have to re-create the wheel. Operational innovators know that these features can be imported during the product build, allowing your critical engineering workforce to work on key development – again saving time and money.

• System Communications

Successful IIoT products depend on its ability to communicate with local and remote applications. The ability for your product to have a programmable interface that can multiplex between different network sessions provides competitive differentiation in today’s market. Designing the inbound and outbound communications that can transparently communicate between machines and local/cloud applications can double, possibly triple your design time.

At Lantronix, innovative product development is the central tenant of how we develop products for the IIoT space. The new XPort EDGE for example; is our embedded ethernet gateway, which provides production-ready embedded software, integrated advanced enterprise security and the ability to remotely monitor, manage and maintain your machines. Being cutting-edge never was so easy!! Learn more about Lantronix XPort EDGE.

Source: https://www.lantronix.com/blog/top-3-ways-reduce-risk-complexity-iot-projects/

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