Twenty-one key factors to choose an IoT platform: Theoretical framework and its applications
This work addresses the challenge for businesses in choosing IoT platforms, but it is incremental as it builds on prior identification of factors.
The paper tackles the problem of selecting an IoT platform by proposing a framework based on 21 key factors, and demonstrates its application by discriminating between five platforms to provide an objective methodology for business applications.
Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the interconnection of physical objects via the Internet. It utilises complex back-end systems which need different capabilities depending on the requirements of the system. IoT has already been used in various applications, such as agriculture, smart home, health, automobiles, and smart grids. There are many IoT platforms, each of them capable of providing specific services for such applications. Finding the best match between application and platform is, however, a hard task as it can difficult to understand the implications of small differences between platforms. This paper builds on previous work that has identified twenty-one important factors of an IoT platform, which were verified by Delphi method. We demonstrate here how these factors can be used to discriminate between five well known IoT platforms, which are arbitrarily chosen based on their market share. These results illustrate how the proposed approach provides an objective methodology that can be used to select the most suitable IoT platform for different business applications based on their particular requirements.