Nice to see a bit more positivity in the SP at the mo. Hopefully more to come as still long way to go.
Anyway, article a few months old that I was just reading and found interesting and enlightening with regards to ecosystem and co-creation in digital transformation.
Just highlights the path with the BRN model as well. Look forward to when some of our ecosystem starts to truly blossom in a $ sense.
Delivering AIoT is all about ecosystems and co-creation
June 22, 2023
Nitin Dahad
With hardware and software becoming increasingly complex, higher levels of solution selling will be essential for technology vendors selling AIoT. Be prepared for more such co-creation, collaboration, ecosystems, and solutions propositions.
This week in Lisbon, Portugal, 60 of ASUS IoT’s partners gathered to hear about its new ‘Co-Winning’ partnership for delivering artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) solutions for markets such as smart retail, smart parking, and smart security. The idea is to create complete solutions to market with partners and co-sell and co-market.
In the press announcement, ASUS’s SVP and co-head of the open platform and AIoT business groups, Jackie Hsu, said, “The ultimate goal is to offer complete solutions to the market, thanks to the combined expertise contributed by our ecosystem partners and by the ASUS AIoT team.” Founded in 2019, ASUS IoT is a sub-brand of ASUS dedicated to the creation of solutions for AI and IoT, supported by a dedicated team of over 300 AI engineers and working closely with tier-1 partners. The ASUS AIoT Alliance Program represents an ecosystem of industry partners, including independent software vendors, value-added resellers, cloud solution providers, distributors, and system integrators.
ASUS IoT presented its ‘Co-Winning’ approach to partners in Lisbon, Portugal. (Image: ASUS)
ASUS IoT highlighted three examples of its ‘Co-Winning’ approach. One was with semiconductor distributor Macnica, in which they co-created a smart replenishment and electronic shelf labeling solution, which leverages AI analytics for accurate object recognition, enabling automated processes such as timely stock level alerts and seamless price updates on the shelves. These solutions were deployed in the stores of one of the leading retailers in Europe.
ASUS IoT license plate recognition includes Tinker Edge R (pictured), which is equipped with a Rockchip neural-processing unit (NPU). (Image: ASUS)
Another example is with SKIDATA, a European company which has installed more than 10,000 access systems for people and vehicles, to ‘revolutionize’ access control for guests arriving at the
Perini Business Park in Brazil. Through the deployment of a sophisticated system, which utilizes license plate recognition technology, SKIDATA and ASUS IoT ensure efficient management of access while also generating statistical insights for park management. The parking solutions also include real-time occupancy detection, alerts, mobile payment/validation, and wayfinding.
The third example cited at the event is its work with Atos, in which they engaged in a collaborative project focused on audience analysis. Utilizing video analytics, the project aims to accurately determine the number of visitors to a picturesque riverside park, create heat maps to identify popular areas, and enable real-time water monitoring alerts and security analytics.
Collaboration and solutions are key
The co-creation approach is not necessarily new, but ASUS IoT clearly wanted to highlight the diversity of its ecosystem and how it is working with relevant partners to enable what is now termed quite widely as digital transformation.
Companies often talk about their technologies or products and the diverse markets they are going into. But those diverse markets don’t necessarily have the technical knowledge or system development expertise to deploy solutions that target their requirement specifically. In order for chip and system-level suppliers to deliver to those end customers, they need many people in the ecosystem that talk to customers at a higher level to understand the scope of their needs.
And that’s why companies like ASUS are working with ‘co-creators’ – these ecosystem partners that help deliver the final end product to the customer. I first heard the term co-create when
I interviewed Jash Bansidhar, managing director of Advantech Europe, in 2020. He told me that it was essential to ‘co-create’, which involves working with independent systems integrators to provide application-ready system-level solutions for IoT implementation in industrial automation, healthcare and smart cities.
Bansidhar emphasized the need for presenting pre-packaged ideas to end-users, and the need to do so with partners who have domain-specific knowledge for the many different potential IoT applications. He remarked that decision-makers for industrial automation applications or smart cities are not going to implement IoT based on some ideas or PowerPoint slides, and that they are less interested in the actual technology stacks below it. “They are interested in knowing how it will look in their environment. So, proof of concepts can only be made once we understand the domain we are working in and the pain points of that domain. And then you need partnerships with ecosystem players who are working in those domains.”
Partner ecosystems are important to everyone, as highlighted successfully by companies like Arm in the processor space, and Nvidia in the GPU space (for example with its
Jetson ecosystem). And many of the chip vendors have progressively been moving up the system stack to provide more board-level, system level and application-level solutions. For example, there are the Renesas
‘Winning Combinations’ which are targeted at system developer level. At maker level, companies like Arduino rely not just on their own boards, but a hole ecosystem and community through its Arduino shields, pluggable over the Arduino to deliver extra functionalities. And the major chip distributors also partner with key system integrators to deliver specific solutions – which was evident at embedded world in Nuremberg earlier this year and very much so at electronica in Munich in 2022.
With the complexity of technologies both at hardware and software level increasing rapidly, the higher levels of solution selling are going to be important to the technology vendors. So be prepared for more such co-creation, collaboration, ecosystems, and solutions propositions.