The rapidly falling costs of sensors and cloud-based storage have more than a few B2B industrial companies wondering if it’s time to add sensors to their products, thereby opening new data (and revenue) streams.

IoT is, of course, big business. Discrete Manufacturing, Transportation and Logistics, and Utilities will lead all industries in IoT spending by 2020, averaging $40B each and Bain predicts B2B IoT segments will generate more than $300B annually by 2020, including about $85B in the industrial sector.

Which may be why I’m sensing a growing level of uneasiness over IoT strategies within the ranks of privately owned middle market companies (assuming those strategies exist at all).

And who can blame them for eyeballing a piece of that considerable pie, particularly when faced with the incessant pressure to generate investor returns? Add some sensors, capture the data and, lo and behold, a new revenue stream is born, right?

Maybe.

The potential of IoT

Given the industry’s mounting interest in IoT and having personally worked with major public […]