See the FAQ titled, “Why use you instead of a custom software or an internet application development firm?” It’s the same answer, just replace “software outsourcing firm” with “web development firm.”
But specific to this question: what they’re doing in a very complex web application project is just very, very different from an IoT project. It’s not what they do. We aren’t saying it is impossible for someone that has web design and e-commerce experience to also have IoT experience, but it’s highly unlikely that their IoT experience would be very deep or wide. The vast majority of companies that specialize in web, e-commerce, and mobile applications simply have not had the exposure to a true IoT application. This is also part of the challenge: the term “IoT” can be used very broadly. Somebody might say, “I wrote an app that lets someone see the pollen count in their zip code and that’s an IoT application.” No, that’s a mobile app. There’s no IoT there whatsoever, but someone will tell you the opposite when trying to sell you on using them. It really does boil down to expertise.
We aren’t saying it isn’t possible, but we are saying it’s unlikely they have the expertise because, frankly, it’s just a different skill set. You can be an amazing musician and know how to play the trumpet, the trombone, the tuba, the French horn and all other brass instruments, but that doesn’t mean – with all the expertise in the world as a musician – you will be an expert at the viola. In fact, odds are, you won’t have a clue about playing the viola. You wouldn’t go to the foremost musical expert in the world who plays brass instruments and expect her to teach you about string instruments. And yet, we see that happen frequently – especially when that company is not terribly technical. They ask themselves, “who do we know that’s technical – oh yeah – we should call the company that built our website. That was technical!” It’s the only technical company they know. And then they call that company and say they want to build this application with all these sensors, etc and the sales guy is like, “Oh heck yeah, we can do that!” – ‘cause they’ll say yes to anything – and then two years later they’ve spent five times their initial budget and they won’t have anything that actually works. This happens literally all the time. If someone came to us and asked us to build an e-commerce system, we’d simply say “no.” And that’s not because we don’t have some idea about how e-commerce works. It’s because we focus on IoT. That is our expertise–the many complex layers of IoT–and that’s what we do. That’s all we do.
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