The IoT Platform Graveyard, and the Position Nobody Has Claimed

mail@carlosprados.com (Carlos Prados) — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0200

The Graveyard
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Around 2015, at the peak of the hype, analysts were tracking the IoT platform market like a gold rush. IoT Analytics counted 260 platforms in 2015, 450 in 2017, and 620 at the peak in 2019. McKinsey had promised an $11 trillion opportunity. Everyone wanted a shovel.

Then the burials started.

Google Cloud IoT Core — retirement announced August 2022, switched off August 16, 2023. Six years from its debut at Google I/O in May 2017, and only five and a half of those generally available.
IBM Watson IoT Platform — sunset December 1, 2023, “without a direct replacement”.
SAP Leonardo — the brand was quietly dismantled years before the underlying IoT service was retired. SAP now embeds Cumulocity — its ex-rival’s platform — inside its own asset management product.
Bosch IoT Device Management — discontinued by mid 2024, citing “the market trend towards cloud providers”.
Azure IoT Central — the strangest entry on this list, because it is not a burial. A February 2024 system message announced retirement for March 31, 2027, with no new applications from that April. Days later Microsoft’s general manager of Azure IoT called that message “not accurate” and “presented in error” — and said nothing about the roadmap. Two years on there is still no committed future for it, and Microsoft is simultaneously a Leader in Gartner’s 2025 Industrial IoT Magic Quadrant. A platform nobody can get a straight answer about is its own kind of dead.
Relayr — the startup Munich Re bought for roughly $300M was wound down in 2025.