Have A 'Secret Sauce'

All solution providers who will make a difference in IoT need some sort of "secret sauce" that differentiates them, stresses Tarhan.

"Over time, if you specialize in a vertical, you would build solutions to reuse and scale in that specific vertical," he said.

In Tarhan's case, one specific vertical he focused on was the medical field, which gave Sturdy Networks a competitive edge when deploying IoT solutions in that vertical because the company already knew the problems customers in the market were facing, along with regulatory compliance issues.

Geevaratne agreed, saying that when New Signature started in IoT, the company looked specifically at its existing customer base for a client in a specific vertical.

"We knew that, as a solution provider, we didn't want to go to everybody, we wanted to take care of specific customers in very specific verticals," he said.