What are IoT Breakthrough Awards?
Before we move on to the actual event, let’s review the state of the IoT market worldwide:
- In 2021, the global IoT market size was valued at $384.7 billion or $326.1 billion, depending on who you ask.
- North America held a dominant revenue share of 34%, followed by Europe (29%) and Asia Pacific (25%).
- By 2021, there was an estimated 28 billion connected devices worldwide.
- The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20-25% until 2030.
- By the end of the forecasted period, IoT would have added $14.2 trillion to the global economy.
Now, IoT Breakthrough Awards were established in 2017, as a way of recognizing the world’s best IoT companies, products, services and people. It is in fact a part of the Tech Breakthrough platform, whose main goal is “to help bold thinkers break through the hype.”
Each year, the winners are awarded in 10 categories, which include:
- Connected Home
- Consumer IoT
- Enterprise IoT
- IoT Component
- Industrial
- M2M
- IoT Partner & Ecosystem
- Connected Car
- Health & Wellness
- Industry Leadership
This year, there was a total of 3,850 submissions and around a hundred winners.
But what are they competing for?
Apparently, for “a well-deserved recognition and third-party validation from an independent organization.”
These are the most important value drivers:
- Cost reduction – Integrated data within IoT solutions can help operators to make better decisions, without requiring them to increase their operational costs.
- Revenue growth – IoT solutions make available to produce customized offerings to end consumers, which eventually leads to revenue growth.
- Security and safety – By using IoT, you can remotely monitor and control assets, determine trends and patterns, and notice any abnormalities.
- Quality control – IoT enables better management of product quality, by giving you insight into process historical data from sensors and edge devices.
The problem is, with so many winners, there’s no way we could get to know all of them and understand why they’re the best in the industry, especially since there’s no official elaboration from the jury.
With that in mind, we can’t help but wonder, is the only purpose of these awards to look good on paper?
The most ground-breaking winners
As mentioned, there are so many winners each year that it’s impossible to list them all and explain why they’re the best in a certain category. Hence, some of them have to be undeservedly left out.
However, we’ve looked into all of them, explored their websites thoroughly to figure out for which business aspect did they even win an award, and made our choice of the most ground-breaking innovations awarded at this year’s IoT Breakthrough Awards.
These are our favorites:
Rently – Connected Home Innovation of the Year
Rently is an enterprise smart home technology provider that invented self-guided touring for rental properties. By using Rently, renters can tour an apartment on their schedule, move in/out, and control their smart home devices all with just the phone in their pocket. Meanwhile, property managers can remotely control access, manage energy usage, monitor activity within a building, etc.
SoundHound – Voice Activated Assist Solution of the Year
The SoundHound voice AI platform enables people to connect with brands by creating customized conversational experiences that voice-enable products, services, and apps. What makes their products unique is ‘Deep Meaning Understanding’ for processing context and complex questions, as well as the ‘Dynamic Interaction’ that enables users to be understood in real-time and get audiovisual feedback.
Halo – Connected Pet Care Solution of the Year
A dog collar that enables you to set boundaries on how far from home (or within the home) your dog can go. Even when you’re not around, the collar can send verbal signals or whistles to navigate the dog to come back.
Lantronix – IoT Innovation Award – Enterprise Solution of the Year
Lantronix’s 24-port managed Gigabit Ethernet PoE++ switch powers multiple applications from a single device and is ideal for IoT applications such as intelligent LED lighting and smart building IoT applications. Benefits include lower energy costs, faster deployment, secure management, and documentation through a cloud-based device manager.
Forescout – IoT Security Company of the Year
Forescout Technologies has helped organizations have a true picture of what is on their networks for more than 20 years. The company’s Continuum Platform provides the most comprehensive visibility into all connected things, ensuring no blind spots on any network. With the platform, organizations can automate security policies and controls to ensure continuous compliance with their devices across enterprise systems.
eleven-x – Overall Smart City Solution of the Year
The comprehensive Smart Parking Monitoring Solution combines a sensor-based real-time occupancy monitoring technology and a complete software platform that provides insight into parking availability for wayfinding as well as more efficient parking management.
OneLayer – IoT Startup of the Year
The platform provides real-time visibility to all connected devices, including device type, location and activity status. The platform detects any anomalous behavior of devices and traffic and quickly responds to misconfigurations and malicious activities. Lastly, zero trust authentication enables automatic new device admission and connectivity.
TrendMiner – Overall IoT Company of the Year
TrendMiner enables process engineers and experts to analyze time-series data on their own, without the help of a data scientist. The solution gives companies the resources to visualize production processes and make quick decisions when anomalies occur, as well as predict future events. It also helps advance digital transformation initiatives.
