Do you think the larger vendors in the market will simply acquire these smaller IoT players over the next few years? Or will there be a healthy number of IoT-focused companies in the market in the future?

The IoT market is in many respects similar to the Internet of the 1990s. The Internet was this untapped technology that radically transformed society and how we track business. The IoT will follow a similar course.

Will there be acquisitions? Certainly, but there will always be a plethora of startups focused on industry-specific solutions, integrations and professional services. There are serious numbers behind the IoT. Gartner’s estimate of 25 billion "Internet-connected things" by 2020 are not going to come from a handful of companies, they will be designed and developed by a global industry potentially on the same scale as mobile, the cloud and other innovation-driven sectors.

You just launched CenterScape -- a framework of data center management software tools built on your Workplace IoT Platform. How is it a differentiator in the IoT market?

We have been building our analytics platform since 2007 and a portfolio of intelligent instrumentation since 1997, so we understand the value of sensor networks and analytics far more than companies that have rushed to jump on the IoT bandwagon. CenterScape is the only IoT solution developed solely for the data center.