“The inaugural IoT Awards in 2015 set the benchmark for IoT creation and innovation in South Africa,” said Mariana Kruger, the MTN Business general manager private sector. “This year has been even better, with a proliferation of exciting solutions that have the potential to drastically transform the IoT space in the future.”
The Best Commercial Solution and Overall Winner was IoT.nxt, a technology company that has developed a world-leading framework that makes the efficiencies, cost savings and increased revenue from IoT a reality for businesses.
“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 their 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 IoT strategy quickly and easily.”
The winner of the Most Disruptive Category went to Hear Scope, whilst 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 an innovative range of GPS tracking and telematics devices and a user-friendly 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.
“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.”
All finalists had the opportunity to be trained on MTN’s revolutionary new machine-to-machine platform and were given access to free software and hardware during the conception phase of the competition. As the overall winners, IOT.nxt received a trip for two to IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona to the value of R200,000.
The awards were held at the same time as MTN’s national IoT Conference, which showcased the latest trends, challenges and opportunities in the IoT space in a variety of industries, such as automotive, healthcare, asset and fleet management, manufacturing, security, retail, smart grid, smart metering, smart home and consumer electronics.
