By Sibahle Malinga, ITWeb’s portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 2 Jun 2017
The winners of the second annual Internet of Things (IOT) Awards were announced yesterday at MTN Business Machine2Machine Conference at the Sandton Convention Centre.
The awards “celebrate the best of SA’s market-ready IOT solutions, applications and developers,” according to MTN Business group executive, Oliver Fortuin.
“This year we were looking for ground-breaking solutions that use IOT applications and technology to generate income, productivity and streamline efficiencies in the corporate world,” added Fortuin. “Interoperability, rapid deployment and ease-of-use were all major considerations.”
The Best Commercial Solution award (sponsored by ITWeb) and Overall Winner went to IoT.nxt, a technology company that has developed a framework that makes the efficiencies, cost savings and increased revenue from IOT a reality for businesses.
IoT.nxt received a cash prize of R200 000 towards a trip to the IOT World Congress in Barcelona in October this year.
“The major strength of the IoT.nxt framework is that the solution is technology agnostic, which overcomes the challenge of connecting any and all devices or systems,” said Fortuin in explaining the decision. “This enables one to deploy best-of-breed technologies with little or no disruption to one’s current operations, allowing businesses to action an Internet of things strategy quickly and easily.”
“This is a great achievement for our team. We are thrilled to receive this recognition and grateful for the acknowledgement for the company. It is an endorsement for what we are doing and celebrates what we have achieved in 18 months,” said Nico Steyn, CEO of IoT.nxt.
The winner of the Most Disruptive Category went to Hear Scope, while Proximity ID took home the Wildcard category with their cardless instant identification and access control system.
The Most Innovative Hardware award went to Digital Matter, which supplies a range of GPS tracking and telematics devices and a Web-based software platform to the fleet, logistics and communications industries.
Indoor farming system MCX AgriTech came out tops in the Best Enterprise Development category.
MTN Business says all finalists had the opportunity to be trained on MTN’s new machine-to-machine platform, and were given access to free software and hardware during the conception phase of the competition.
The awards were part of MTN’s national IOT Conference, which showcased trends, challenges and opportunities in the IOT space in a variety of industries.
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