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at your service: Xaas
By
Gary
Kim
What we do not have is any shared
definition of what TaaS entails, much
less any common understanding of
what specific products will become
available and popular.
For such reasons, we cannot say
with any certainty, yet, what opportuni-
ties might develop for channel partners.
In principle, TaaS should take its place
with other software, infrastructure or
platform services sold “as a service”
to enterprises. On the other hand, we
already have some examples of man-
aged services similar in concept to
“things as a service” that illustrate how
TaaS eventually could develop.
Consider the lighting division of elec-
tronics company Philips and the energy
services company Cofely. Together,
those firms now provide lighting as a
service to Schiphol, Europe’s fourth-
busiest airport.
The airport pays only for the light it
uses, while Philips remains the owner of
all fixtures and installations, taking joint
responsibility with Cofely for the perfor-
mance of the system and ultimately its
reuse and recycling at end of life.
If you think about it, that resembles
a telecom “managed service,” where the
customer pays for usage, and the man-
aged service includes use of hardware
that is included as part of the service.
There also are some similarities to
consumer services such as video enter-
tainment, where access to content is the
main value of the service, but use of the
decoders also is bundled (consumers do
not “buy and own” set-tops but essen-
tially lease them).
Those two examples are illustrative.
The “things” in both cases are enablers of
the service, and it is the “service” which
How ‘IoT as a Service’ could develop
W
ith the Internet of things such a nascent trend,
it is difficult to predict which new products might
develop that are sold through the communications
channel, and in what volumes. We do already have an
acronym – Internet of things as a service (TaaS) – to
describe platforms or perhaps other services sold “as
a service” to business buyers.
Things to Consider
Channel
Vision
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May - June, 2017
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