China's banks, telcos and utilities are all rushing to buy computers and software for their back offices, and Microsoft will get a chunk of that business.
"We run the world's most mission critical systems for banks, telcos and utilities," says Sean Poulley, IBM's vice president of online collaboration services.
There are rivals, but a rich potential market of 300m European homes and partnerships with European telcos and utility firms.
The company provides integrated design and operates solutions to large multi-national clients in the following sectors: Manufacturing, Retail, and Services; Public Sector, Healthcare & Transport; Telcos, Media and Utilities; and Financial Services.
Well, it's aiming to fetch and process data from most major players like telcos, banks, public utilities, be integrated with major storage players like dropbox; and offer workflows like signing, paying, and so on.
IoT entrepreneurs who may want to exit to larger consumer corporates like utilities, telcos or entertainment providers must understand the benefits these operators bring – namely, the scale required to make a loss on product cost in pursuit of a bigger payday.
This would allow a big customer to spike directly into one of the new fiber channels that are being installed all across the country, by everyone from new breed telcos to slumbering giant natural gas utilities at unprecedented rates.
The utilities can go to all kinds of technologies, even telcos like for a cell phone tower, you need storage there as well, especially in places like India and elsewhere.
The telcos and Microsoft will be disenfranchised by the digital dark horses — utility companies and entrepreneurs in space.
Insurance giants and telcos have a clear strategic interest in IoT — with the technology promising to drive network usage and utility on the telco side, and offering transformative potential for the insurance industry as data streams can be used to monitor equipment performance and predict (and even steer off) costly failures.
