The background

Commercial IoT has received substantial press over the last three years. It started in 2015 with hyped claims of IoT’s ability to deliver total transformation, but expectations around the technology have matured and IoT is now viewed as a reasonable technique for solving business problems. However, one thing has not changed: When it comes to IoT market participants, the focus of the discussion remains on larger IT vendors, SIs and customers. The missing story is the involvement of the distributors, VARs and smaller SIs, and the current needs of the small to midsize customers.

What are distributors?

Distributors sit between IT vendors and VARs or SIs, procuring equipment or software from the former and distributing it to the latter two. Because distributors generally have a very large customer base, they can help vendors reach more customers or provide a channel for vendors that cannot afford to build their own, such as smaller ISVs. Because distributors procure equipment from vendors and stock it themselves, they are incentivized to educate VARs or SIs about vendor products and help market them as well as to deliver sales training, demos and exhibitions. Distributors are masters of the supply chain, bundling and contract negotiations.

What are VARs?

VARs, along with SIs, serve on the frontline of IT and offer a more tailored storefront to customers than a larger vendor. VARs will seek to build and deliver turnkey solutions by mixing and matching technology and software, as well as layering on services of their own, such as integration, customization, consulting, training and implementation. VARs are often organized by customer type, from those offering general IT services to those specializing in education, the public sector, heavy industry and other niche areas. VARs, along with SIs, often have the keenest grasp on customer challenges, making them well positioned to package IoT components, build applications or offer services.

It has been a wild and chaotic ride for Internet of Things (IoT) vendors, with many placing big bets on IoT in the past and entering 2018 largely disappointed by the results. While IoT will likely never meet the expectations placed on it in 2015 and 2016 — the peak of hype — IoT’s contribution to IT vendor revenue will increase, with IoT ultimately becoming a core revenue driver. IoT, as a technique to solve business challenges through the assembly of technology to drive results, such as predictive maintenance, resource efficiency, value-added services or generally, increase insight, is not going anywhere.

The good news for vendors is IoT is getting a lot easier as the ecosystem sorts itself out. The increase in portfolio focus and partnering is making the market easier to navigate for vendors and customers. Offerings are becoming easier to implement and integrate as vendors begin to converge on architectures and standards, as well as orient go-to-market strategies toward coopetition rather than “winner takes all.” Customers are coming to market with a greater understanding of what they are looking for thanks to efforts by vendors and early adopters educating the market and cutting through the hype pays off. TBR believes 2019 marks the emergence of “go-to-market 2.0” as an evolved strategy for both IT and OT vendors seeking to better profit from IoT.

The 1Q19 Commercial IoT Market Landscape looks at technologies and trends of the commercial IoT market. Additionally, TBR catalogs and analyzes by vertical more than 450 customer deals, uncovering use trends, identifying opportunities, examining maturity, and discussing drivers and inhibitors.

At its 2016 Investor Day, Atos publicly set its course for the next three years, identifying digital transformation as the high-growth, high-value segment of the market on which it aimed to capitalize. The company then positioned itself as the digital services and payments leader in Europe and leveraged its Digital Transformation Factory (DTF) and e-payments subsidiary Worldline to shift its revenue mix to higher-value, next-generation solutions. Back in 2016 TBR predicted that Atos was making a smart move that was in line with industry trends. We expected that staying with its digital services and payments strengths as well as diversifying its geographic reach by expanding in North America would enable Atos to sustain revenue growth and improve profitability. Atos met its financial goals for 2018, and the company is now making a shift in its strategic direction. At its 2019 Investor Day, Atos updated its course for the next three years. While Atos will continue to expand in digital services, the payments services component will not be part of the equation as Atos is deconsolidating its e-payments subsidiary Worldline. Deconsolidating Worldline as a stand-alone listed pure play business is a logical move that will have an immediate positive effect and enable Atos to focus on its core digital services activities.

The big break: Separating Atos and Worldline

TBR believes Atos began to prepare Worldline to become a stand-alone business with the initial public offering (IPO) of Worldline in 2014. During the past four years, Worldline has operated as an Atos subsidiary and, as part of financial reporting, was one of Atos’ four divisions along with Infrastructure & Data Management (IDM), Business & Platform Solutions and Big Data & Cybersecurity. Worldline had its own CEO, leadership team, brand identity, strategy and financial goals, and the separation from Atos will not hinder the new company. With annual revenues of €2.2 billion (or $2.5 billion) and 11,500 employees, Worldline will continue to pursue its goal of becoming a leading payment services provider in Europe, especially after the acquisition of SIX Payment Services in May 2018. At its Annual General Meeting on April 30, Atos plans to submit a resolution to distribute to Atos shareholders 23.4% of Worldline’s share capital, out of the 50.8% currently owned by the Atos Group. After the transaction is complete, Atos will retain 27.4% of Worldline’s share capital, 26.9% will be held by SIX Group, and the balance of 45.7% will be free float shares.

As of May, Atos and Worldline will become two listed global pure play services providers specializing in digital services and payment services, respectively. TBR sees this split as inevitable as it enables both companies to individually pursue their goals utilizing their core expertise and gives them a targeted direction for their strategic activities. While the preparations to scale Worldline to a stand-alone company took several years, the Atos board was very quick to organize the separation process by establishing an ad hoc committee in December 2018 and announcing the decision on Jan. 30. As noted during the presentation, Atos and Worldline will maintain all existing partnerships “on an arm’s length basis,” pursuing a joint go-to-market strategy and continuing their industrial and commercial partnership.

Atos’ 2019 Investor Day was held at the company’s headquarters near Paris. The meeting was hosted by Atos Chairman and CEO Thierry Breton and key members of Atos’ executive leadership team. The company used the event to announce to the financial and industry analyst community its vision, strategy and three-year plan through 2021. The main message was that Atos is positioning as a trusted partner for clients’ digital journeys. Atos focuses on enabling customers’ digital businesses with secure, data-driven ecosystems and end-to-end, industry-specific services and technologies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) utilization has been accelerating rapidly for more than 10 years, as decreases in memory, storage and computation cost have made an increasing number of applications cost-effective. The technique of deep learning has emerged as the most useful. Large public websites such as Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), with enormous stores of data on user behavior and a clear benefit from influencing user behavior, were among the earliest adopters and continue to expand such techniques. Publicly visible applications include speech recognition, natural language processing and image recognition. Other high-value applications include network threat detection, credit fraud detection and pharmaceutical research.

Deep learning techniques are based on neural networks, inspired by animal brain structure. Neural networks perform successive computations on large amounts of data. Each iteration operates on the results of the prior computation, which is why the process is called “deep.” Deep learning relies on large amounts computation. In fact, deep learning techniques are well known; the recent growth is driven by decreasing costs of data acquisition, data transmission, data storage and computation. The new processors all aim to lower the cost of computation.

The new chips are less costly than CPUs for running deep learning workloads

Each computation is limited and tends to require relatively low precision, necessitating fewer bits than found in typical CPU operations. Deep learning computations are mostly tensor operations — predominantly matrix multiplication — and parallel tensor processing is the heart of many specialized AI chips. Traditional CPUs are relatively inefficient in carrying out this kind of processing. They cannot process many operations at the same time, and they deliver precision and capacity for complex computations that are not needed.

Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) GPUs led the wave of new processors. In 2012, Google announced that its Google Brain deep learning project to recognize images of cats was powered by Nvidia GPUs, resulting in a hundredfold improvement in performance over conventional CPUs. With this kind of endorsement and with the widespread acceptance of the importance of deep learning, many companies, large and small, are following the money and investing in new types of processors. It is not certain that the GPU will be a long-term winner; successful applications of FPGAs and TPUs are plentiful.