What are the best revenue-generating opportunities for solution providers?

Without hesitation, Luis Alvarez points to data analytics. "All of these devices, all of these systems, produce a ton of data," the president and CEO of Alvarez Technology Group, of Salinas, Calif., told IT Best Of Breed. To prevent that data from piling up in some data warehouse, solution providers can help clients rein in the data "in a way that's meaningful and gives them the ability to make good business decisions based on all these pieces of information being put together and drawing correlations across all of that," he said.

Alvarez also points to expansion of wireless communication and leveraging it beyond just providing Internet access. For example, he's working with retirement communities that are deploying wireless technology on dementia patients to track their whereabouts.