Did you know why we built an IoT platform? And why is it important when you want to deploy IoT services? Many have scorned this idea and claimed that they can build their own IoT platform by themselves.
Here’s the story as told by Dr. Mazlan Abbas, CEO of FAVORIOT
It all started when we build our Startup. Our strength is mainly software because building a hardware company will incur a lot of costs and we don’t have enough cash to build one. We also noticed that the whole IoT ecosystem in Malaysia is missing one important component i.e. IoT Platform.
There are two problems which we faced in Malaysia
- The current IoT talent is using overseas IoT platforms such as ThingSpeak, Carriots, ThingsBoards, Kao, etc
- Not enough talent but they are hungry to start an IoT project.
After we have built our own Malaysian-made IoT platform, we see both issues above are the main stumbling block to scale.
- Some factors which we can’t control (people preferred overseas products) but we have to prove that our Favoriot IoT platform is at par with others too
- Building our own IoT ecosystem of IoT Developers who we called “Generation-IoT”. But how do create and get this community together?
It started very slowly from the first 10 users to 100 and later it was stagnant at 200 users for a long time. We see many potential users are still in the Universities but they are not exposed to IoT. Thus, I went back to the Universities as Industry Advisory Panel to advise and revise or refresh their syllabus or courses to suit the real industry needs especially in the IoT area.
But we still have problems with getting the students or lecturers to use our locally-made platform because the Universities have their “own way” of making a decision. Some of them (even though they appreciate what I have done to help refresh their IoT syllabus), they still decide to choose overseas products and not our locally-made IoT platform.
But we did not give up because we believed that sooner or later, such IoT Labs will require an IoT platform that other overseas products can’t provide or too expensive for Lab purposes.
We have made many roadshows and talks and finally, we have more than 2800 IoT developers from 94 countries around the world and 80% of them are from Malaysia. Not only students but also other companies have assigned their Iot developers to test out our platforms and have used for their commercial IoT solutions.
As per the local Universities, ironically, the ones that we met at a later stage are the ones that quickly adopted FAVORIOT as their Lab platforms. Unfortunately, the ones that we have worked much earlier (in the beginning) have yet to adopt it officially.
But, like any other business, we are not going to give up. The country is moving towards IR 4.0. The core technology for IR 4.0 is IoT. There’s nowhere to run. But when other institutions and companies are running, they better run faster – otherwise, they will be left behind.
Sooner or later, countries like India, the USA, Indonesia, and Thailand will catch up with Malaysia in terms of numbers because they are embracing very fast in adopting our locally-made Favoriot IoT platform!
Join the IoT Community, click HERE!
How can you have the conception that we are moving towards IR4.0 when still complaining that we always in the IR2.0?
Please advice?
We are in IR 2.7 on average around Malaysia. We have a big gap between Urban that’s already in IR 3.0 against rural areas. To move towards IT 4.0, the pre-requisite for most industries, they must have Internet and IT database. There are companies that have the potential to move to IR 4.0 but they are lacking the right mindset or don’t want to make the first move. We need to jumpstart the rest. Malaysia is “moving” towards IR 4.0 because we have the Framework but we still lack the execution and the gap in getting everybody onboard.