Poll: What is the most important thing you need to know about IoT right now?

Getting Adequate funding for kicking off a product including R & D Costs and FW development is also a great challenge.

Another great issue is Inter Operability between various platforms and NON Standardisation with Each different module/ Sensor having its own libraries to interface the IoT HW 

Regards,

Precise sensors, actuators and Edge computation

True roaming capability.

Regards,

Security of IoT devices and their data has to be the most important topic for me. I have seen different approaches to this in RoadTests I have carried out this year - the HARTING Mica left it up to the user to work out how to make its MQTT protocol messages secure, the AVNET Azure Sphere is irrevocably associated with the user's AD credentials and the Particle Mesh uses the built-in encryption offered by the OpenThread AES encryption across the network.

[edit]

I forgot the Symbisa which uses its own private 2G network to carry the IoT data securely.

This image does not show in Chrome, but it does in MS Edge.

I agree that Wireless connectivity is important but one of the growing areas in IOT, especially Industrial IOT is adding sensing to legacy equipment that may not be due for replacement for years, so

Sensing (Temp, Vibration,Power Consumption etc), but not just the sensors, but some intelligence behind it, for example, Temperature only needs to be sampled every 10 seconds in many cases (Or less frequently), Local Alarms on sensed values etc. nothing complicated as this is the domain of a gateway or higher level process.

Battery Management / Power,

Wireless Connectivity (Specifically) Low power but not just BLE or WIFI which have only a relatively short range

In my opinion, systems engineering & reliability engineering (bathtub curves in particular) are rather important to improve reliability and reducing complexity of an IoT application.

Then within these fields we get the methodologies related to systems improvement and specifically field testing is very important to getting beyond an IoT proof of concept.

I was thinking about IoT systems and systems engineering and how it all combines, and I see these two guys from IBM (Bleakley) & PTC (Hause) coined a term, which I rather like (well I like a derivative of it anyway), which is "Systems of IoT systems". This, in essence, represents the whole connectivity ecosystem.

Here are some links to what I am referring to:

https://www.omg.org/news/meetings/tc/il-16/special-events/iiot-presentations/Hause_Bleakley.pdf

https://www.ecnmag.com/blog/2016/04/what-internet-things-needs-systems-engineering

Here's a cool diagram extracted from that pdf (Systems of Systems Engineering and the Internet of Things, or “Your IoT App is only as good as it’s least

stable interface”)

sensors

actuators

signal conditioning

IoT modules