Cloud-connected devices are some of the most popular and flexible embedded devices developed in the last decades. It often surprises clients used to manufacturing more traditional stand-alone products that connected devices need so much support and have so much continuing cost once they are ready for sale.
For the purposes of this article, let us assume that you have developed something that passes all your acceptance tests, your manufacturing facilities are set up and ready to go, and all regulatory compliance tests have been completed. With a non-connected product, at this stage you are down to production and sales/marketing issues. Not so with connected devices!
Before your device’s data can get to the cloud, it has to have some sort of network connection. Sometimes you can take advantage of a pre-existing wireless network, but for many connected devices you are talking about some sort of cellular connection. Cellular data is not transferred for free, and this data transfer will be a cost that will be ongoing for the lifetime of the product. You need to think about how this cost will be paid, how you pass it on to your customers, and what you do if you ever need to change cellular networks.
The next commercial issue is your cloud usage. As part of your project specification you should have considered the costs associated with the cloud for each device (data storage and download, for example). Again, this is something that you need to consider how you will fund as an ongoing cost to your company. You won’t have a great deal of room to manoeuvre once you have chosen your cloud provider; “just” changing to another provider is the sort of “small change” that involves several months, a team of developers and a surprisingly large amount of pain, so think about it carefully.
In software terms too, cloud usage can require continuing support after development is notionally complete. Security vulnerabilities will undoubtedly arise, and patches will need to be applied to web-facing interfaces, web applications and/or device firmware. Certification requirements or regional regulations may change, requiring firmware updates. And of course you may have bug fixes and improvements of your own to deploy. You will need people who are familiar with all of the technical aspects of your product to take care of issues like those. These could be part of your original development team (a potentially expensive proposition if you contracted out the development work), but more likely you will want dedicated support engineers to handle day-to-day issues. In particular, you do not want to be negotiating with contractors for engineer availability when a security issue comes to light, you need it fixed as soon as possible!
Talking about firmware changes brings up the thorny issue of firmware upgrades. We’ve written about this before, but for this discussion just consider that you need a mechanism for getting your new firmware to your devices. This transport mechanism will not come for free, and that is yet another commercial cost you need to take into account.
Something that is frequently overlooked is that the users of these devices will often need support. Adapting von Moltke’s famous dictum, no product strategy survives contact with the customer. No matter how thorough your testing regime may be, there will be corner cases that you had not considered and some of your customers will have exactly those cases. You need technical support for those customers, and many more who will have teething troubles or misunderstandings that you cannot reasonably expect to anticipate. It’s common to skimp on this step these days, providing a “knowledge base” that customers can get to via your website, sometimes with a chatbot to assist. As a customer, this is a perfectly reasonable solution when your problem is in the FAQ list, but does not make you feel loved if you have a more complex problem. Replacing the chatbot with a full-blown AI assistant can help considerably, but again is a cost you will have to bear. Ideally you would have properly trained customer support engineers to diagnose problems and offer solutions, and most importantly keep customers happy with your company. Unfortunately all the solutions that actually work have associated costs, and you need to factor those costs into your commercial plans.
If all this sounds discouraging, cost after cost after cost, then it shouldn’t. These should all be costs that have been in your business plan from the start. That’s what we’re trying to hammer home here, and what we advise clients of as we work on designing connected products. Don’t let ongoing costs come as a nasty surprise to you.