The Internet of Things (IoT) is being wildly overhyped, and developers would be better off looking at it as the “Internet of Sensors” if they want to get ahead. “Companies that embrace the IoS and not the IoT will be the winners in the connected world,” claims a U.K.-based technology and development organization called The Technology Partnership (TTP).

TTP’s argument is a fairly logical, if simple one: “The IoT is, to a large extent, a solution looking for a problem, rather than the other way round,” wrote Steve Taylor, senior consultant at TTP. “There’s simply no point in objects talking to each other just for the sake of it and the IoT only provides the communications backbone. An Internet of Sensors looks more like the roots of a tree, with sensors of all types at the extremities, capturing and feeding data upwards to the main trunk—the Internet.”

The U.K.-based analyst firm also dismisses talk that the IoT could be the “next big thing”, saying there’s too much hype surrounding the concept.

“The IoT hype is supported by silicon vendors eager to dream up new applications for chips,” Taylor asserted.

TTP isn’t the only one to make this claim. Thomas Conte, an engineering professor who co-chaired the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’s (IEEE) Rebooting Computing initiative, argued that companies like Intel Corp. are eager to promote the IoT as a way of selling chips that can make devices intelligent. Like Taylor, Conte says that applications should drive the IoT’s infrastructure, and the future of computing as a whole, Enterprise Tech reported.

What’s more, the concept of IoT certainly isn’t anything new. TTP says its been invested in machine to machine (M2M) technologies for the last twenty years, building sensors for everything from cattle to Formula One race cars.

TTP’s Taylor says that companies like Intel are really “putting the ‘cart before horse,’” with their insistence on pushing IoT as fast as possible, building smart ‘things’ just for the sake of it. Instead, developers need to look at genuine needs and then see how IoT solutions can be built to meet them.

“In this world, small changes in the sensor map can lead to very significant commercial gains,” Taylor writes.

Taylor notes that Google has set a good example of doing it the right way. The search giant has proven the business case for data-mining everything everyone does online, in order to gain better insights into our lifestyles, so it knows what kinds of services and advertisments might interest us. He says that organizations in almost every industry are looking to replicate this success with their own products and assets, noting there’s a huge amount of data that’s not being “listened to”. For example, heavy industry could save billions of dollars each year simply by building better temperature modelling systems in order to save a few percentage points of energy.

“There is a great business opportunity for both established companies and start-ups as the new connected world evolves, but it’s those who think first about real world information and how to capture and harness it – those who think about the IoS and not the IoT – that will emerge as the winners,” Taylor concluded.

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