Almost six years after its establishment in Europe, Belgian company IOT Factory is paving the way for its future development in Asia, avid for serving the Equipment as a Service (EaaS) market with its strength in IoT applications. The company joined Garage+, an incubation project for startups initiated by the Epoch Foundation, to unlock the door to the Asian IoT market.

Founded by eight telematics and mobile applications veterans, the Siberia and Brussels-based company IOT Factory, has been dedicating itself to optimizing IoT business processes. IOT Factory is a powerhouse under the leadership of Lionel Anciaux. Most notably, its astute knowledge of IoT, M2M, Industrial 4.0, asset tracking, and smart metering makes IoT Factory an effective force for a community.

IOT Factory's IoT software platform is adopted by many major telecom operators in Iceland and Andorra. Leveraging its technical expertise, IOT Factory has gained customers in smart metering and asset tracking space in Europe, Russia, China, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and the Middle East. In terms of its products, IoT Factory has been outsourcing the production of its devices such as sensors, transmitters, converters, and trackers to its partner in Siberia, Russia. The most recent order was up to 9,000 devices.

IOT Factory has more than thirty smart solution templates, ranging from smart office, water metering, air quality monitoring to energy monitoring or optimization, that are ready to fulfill the demanding customer needs. To give readers a concrete example, if someone mentioned the phrase "smart metering", the next thing that would most readily come to mind is surely energy monitoring. IoT Factory offers a smart solution that allows an organization to calculate its carbon footprint, leading to costs savings and reduce energy consumption, identify impacts of the supply chain, improve processes, and make mandatory energy reporting more efficient and reliable. Data that used to be difficult to obtain is now one click away from the end-users, on their laptops, tablets, or even smartphones. The company also serves as the energy optimization advisor for some businesses. In terms of devices, IOT Factory's products include sensors, trackers, and custom sensors for networks such as LORAWAN, NB-IoT, M2M, Wi-Fi, BLE; as well as both the outdoor and indoor LORAWAN gateway.

The Dubai case best exemplifies IOT Factory's expertise in customization. Anciaux explained, "Our client wants to deploy a sensor that can connect up to 250 meters for each black box [the water and air quality monitoring purposes]. Altogether, we were requested to deliver a technology that is capable to support up to 1 million meters. Usually, what we do is connect 1 black box, 1 meter; 1 sensor to 5, 10, or 15 meters. They come to us because they can't find anyone in the market."

Anciaux continued, "We, as a company, want to go much more vertical in smart metering, typically in asset tracking. This is a challenge for us. As we want to verticalize our business, the market is progressively asking for more and more features. They want more specialization."

Equipment-as-a-service

Anciaux said firmly, "The future is Equipment-as-a-service. So, more and more, in the world, you will not buy any equipment. You will pay for the service."

It all goes back to the team's inspiration—shared power banks in China. More particularly, a business that dispenses portable phone chargers for rent. Third-party companies such as restaurants, stores, and malls, set up charger stations and take a cut of the revenue. The phone charging market is estimated to grow from US$1.4 billion in 2020 to US$16 billion in 2028, according to an article by SupChina's Business & Technology.

In fact, the term Equipment-as-a-Service (EaaS) is not exactly a novel concept. It has been a common practice in certain industries for more than a decade. Taking the much-touted Rolls-Royce model as an example, it has transformed the conventional way in selling aircraft turbines to the power-by-the-hour method and creates a win-win solution for all concerned. Given the maturity of technologies such as Industrial IOT (IIOT), 5G, cloud, big data, and artificial intelligence today, this notion further reinforces many digital service solutions to neither improve their existing EaaS models nor trigger the first adoption.

Anciaux added, "To do that, you need our technology, you need sensors, you need an IoT software platform where you can manage your customers, where you can give access to the guys who will do the maintenance, you need to give access to the end customers who can get some reports and dashboards."

Expanding into Asia

When DigiTimes asked the question of "What is the next step on the company's roadmap? Any plan for overseas expansions? "Yes, we want to expand. How to do it? We want to investigate first as I told you this equipment-as-a-service business model where we [the team] came together because there are a lot of hardware manufacturers in your country [Asia]," said Anciaux.

Holding on to this vision, IOT Factory seizes every opportunity to go and step out of its comfort zones. The team is determined to bounce back from the doom and believes that Asia is the last piece of the puzzle. The following is IOT Factory current challenges:

Anciaux explained that they hope to achieve three objectives through joining the Garage+, including finding the right partners to work with in Asia, finding investors around the globe, and finding components parts for their products.

Lionel Anciaux, the CEO of IOT Factory