At the heart of any IoT system are devices talking to one another and the cloud. These devices speak with messages, and these messages are the conversations we care about when building an IoT Application.
The languages that these devices speak can be anything – JSON, XML, CSV or binary to name a few. Also, the sentence structure for a specific device within any of those languages can be unique. All those languages are one of the critical challenges of building an IoT Application, how can you interpret what the devices are saying into something useful for your business.
A good test I devised early on in my consulting career was after a system gets deployed, and a single field needs adding to the database, how much work was involved in making the modification and letting that change flow through to the system. The same test applies here when you are looking at an IoT platform. How much time, money and risks are involved, when your message structure changes or new devices added in a completely different language.