Understanding the IoT Market: In conversation with Knud Lasse Lueth

Making sense of the global IoT market and staying abreast of trends in technology comes with plenty of challenges. Few people know this better than Knud Lasse Lueth, Chief Executive Officer at IoT Analytics.

His team, founded in 2014 in Germany, have gained a strong reputation for high-quality research and strategic business intelligence that helps organizations to navigate complex and ever-changing topics such as IoT, AI, Cloud and smart manufacturing.

Recent reports have included reflections on the changing regulatory landscape, deep dives on sectors like smart manufacturing, and advanced analysis of the Cellular IoT market.

Let’s go back to the start. How did IoT Analytics first come about?

My own background was in industrial engineering, but I was always looking out for the new topics that were coming to the fore. It really started with a website and a blog, and a desire to see if I could use my expertise to quantify this new, connected world.

Very quickly I found that IoT couldn’t really be quantified via one platform, and that it was made up of lots of niche areas of knowledge, and that’s where I really started to develop the workstreams we have now.

Your own role must have changed a lot since 2014, with a full team to manage.

Yes, it’s definitely shifted! I am constantly balancing the role of CEO with all its facets such as strategic thinking, customer involvement and team leadership alongside the role as the Chief editor of our market research which is comparable to that of a chief editor of a magazine. This is particularly difficult because I really enjoy being on the ground and doing market research.

With so many potential topics, how do you choose what to focus your efforts on?

We have a process for that. We often start the year with a long list of 150 research topics that are of interest to us. Then we go out and speak to clients about what resonates with them and what doesn’t. We then overlay that insight with what we think to come up with a calendar for the year.

Of course, we build in some room for flexibility, just as we did with for our article on US tariffs and what that means for the market, or when we undertook a deep dive on AI and robotics. That piece came about simply because a couple of clients had mentioned it was an area of interest, and there were upcoming conferences we could get to where we gather that insight. So there are times it’s just the right time to delve into a topic.

IoT Analytics is now over a decade old – what have been the defining changes in the IoT space in that time?

We’ve actually been writing about this recently and trying to provide some context to different phases that IoT has been through.

At the start, when we were first on the scene, a lot of people were just starting to explore the mass market opportunities. Ericsson and Cisco had announced their projection of their being 50 billion connected devices by 2020, and other reports echoed that sense of near euphoria about the scale of that opportunity. A lot of companies jumped on board.

We had this period between 2014 and 2017 when there was a mode of thinking about IoT software platforms becoming a ‘Google’ for connected things, and several big players got involved searching for that.

Then from 2017 to 2020 we hit a bit of ‘reality’. There was still plenty of growth in the IoT market, but it wasn’t quite the exponential growth that had been predicted. It wasn’t the ‘blue ocean’ opportunity that had been prophesised. Some of the big players started to step away from the software market. What we did see, though, was a number of sectors finding their feet and developing their own markets – for smart metering, automotive, IIoT.

The Covid pandemic brought a lot of unusual swings, of course. It was a period of consolidation for many but there was a boon in healthcare applications and supply chain management.

Now we’re in something of a new era, defined by AI. Most organizations no longer have a defined IoT strategy, it’s a given that IoT is a part of their wider pan. Now the focus on how they make their connected strategy intelligent. It’s an AI strategy now.

In a sense it feels a lot like the IoT market did 10 years ago. The expectations for AI are incredibly high and it’ll be interesting to see how it unfolds, and what sticks. It’ll definitely shape what we write about, more and more.area of interest, and there were upcoming conferences we could get to where we gather that insight. So there are times it’s just the right time to delve into a topic.

AI is obviously shaping the IoT market, but is it also affecting how you go about researching topics and providing customers with insight?

At the heart of it, our goal is the same. Over the past decade, IoT Analytics has helped clients make sense of emerging, often vague trends, enabling them to focus on the opportunities that matter and align their teams around them. In several cases, major product launches have been shaped by our market sizing, unique data points, and clear framing of the competitive landscape. That remains our ambition as the market enters the AI era.

But we are also thinking about how AI will change the nature of our work.

We want to draw on every possible source to provide compelling insights that our customers can use for better decision-making. Now, a customer can use ChatGPT or a similar tool to search online for some insights in a matter of seconds, and so we have to reinforce our focus on the information and insight that isn’t readily available or searchable.

We used to make sure that each report was informed by around 20 meaningful discussions with industry insiders, and we’d get to a conference on that specific topic to gather as much information as possible. We’d supplement that with data, good examples and case studies and our analysts were blending that primary and secondary research together for our customers.

Though a prompt can get some of that secondary research, we know our strength lies in the conversations an algorithm can’t have. So, we’re now getting our analysts to have at least 30 meaningful discussions per topic and getting to several subject-specific conferences. By increasing the breadth and depth of our primary research we can give customers something that simply can’t be replicated by a prompt – and that’s where our value lies.