Companies can explore off-the-shelf software and platforms to get started with their Industrial Internet applications journey. Sooner or later, they will face the build versus buy decision.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) advised customers and technology adopters to first reorient or realign their overall business strategy to embrace and fully benefit from the latest developments in the Industrial Internet. In this process, they will need to identify their new ecosystem partners. They will need to determine whether they should join a partner's IoT platforms or develop their own. Companies in the initial stages of this Industrial Internet journey should identify the initial one or two pilot application avenues to pilot them in the next few months to get started and capture first-hand learning, irrespective of the COTS or custom route they choose.

In a Forbes article (https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckcohn/2014/09/15/build-vs-buy-how-to-know-when-you-should-build-custom-software-over-canned-solutions/#2841c7d2c371), the benefits of a custom software strategy are defined with the following caution:

• Custom software is justified if it provides a competitive advantage relative to your competitors
• If building a large business, it can spread the cost of a proprietary system over many internal and/or external customers

Since many Industrial Internet needs and applications are still maturing, early adopters should decide where they want to end up on this spectrum of COTs and fully custom. There are both technological and business drivers as inputs to such decisions. The available technology such as the IoT platform which meets only a subset of the requirements for the initial set of applications may steer the company in one direction. There may be overlaying business factors such as a strategic move to reduce dependence on in-house resources for IT and software skills. In addition, there is a top-level mandate to adopt cloud technologies, as this is a route to reduce in-house dependence. The net result of the situation may be the adoption of the IoT cloud platform as the starting point and then building the application on top of it. This would result in a hybrid scenario, according to the following diagram:

In the previous scenario, the IoT cloud platform is providing the PaaS layer. In this case, the company would use that as the starting point, and do a fit-gap analysis to see what the missing PaaS capabilities are may have to build on top of the underlying IaaS layer. Once the requirements are met at this level, the company can then build the SaaS to deliver Industrial Internet applications. Some IoT platforms may deliver SaaS applications as well. We will look at APM in the next section and use it as a basis of assessing Industrial Internet applications.