Why small is beautiful – the role of IoT data analytics start-ups

In June, both Salesforce and Google made significant acquisitions to enrich their big data analytics (BDA) offerings: the former acquired Tableau for $15.7 billion, while the latter secured Looker for $2.6 billion. These have further cemented each company’s position as major competitors in the data analytics market, including the nascent IoT BDA segment. Notwithstanding the influence of these tech giants in data analytics, we argue that it is the highly active start-up community that is best positioned to develop the roadmap for IoT data analytics. In turn, this community should become an attractive customer segment for stakeholders in the wider IoT ecosystem, namely operators and vendors of connectivity management and device management platforms.