Engineering Services Firm Witekio Pivots To IT Channel Amid Major IoT Growth, Plans Second U.S. Office

Lured by the massive growth opportunity in the Internet of Things market, engineering services firm Witekio is expanding its U.S. presence and going after end-user customers in a bid to become one of the IT channel's newest up-and-comers.

The France-based company has a 30-person engineering office in Seattle and is now planning to open a second U.S. office, for both engineering and sales, in the Boston area during the first half of 2018, Witekio CEO Yannick Chammings told CRN.

[Related: Witekio CEO On How IoT Is Bringing Industries Together]

Originally focused on creating embedded systems for OEM customers since its founding in 2002, Witekio has repositioned itself over the past year as a systems software integrator specializing in IoT.

The goal has been to capture the faster-growing opportunities available in the IoT market, and the company is expecting to see its revenue grow between 20 percent and 25 percent this year, Chammings said.

"It's not just about the software running on the device anymore. It's about how the device integrates into a bigger-scale system, integrates into the cloud, interacts with other devices, collects data, uses data," he said. "We moved the positioning of Witekio [to be] not just technical experts like we were since the beginning, but also about complete software integration."

That can include handling such areas as security, connectivity and cloud integration, Chammings said.

The work is now to "make this embedded device part of a complex IoT scenario, interacting with other devices, interacting with the cloud, interacting with mobile platforms, and to basically deliver the complete solution," he said.

For instance, Witekio recently implemented a smart building project for an energy provider customer, which involved bringing together cloud-connected energy metering solutions to save energy and enable predictive maintenance for power infrastructure.

Witekio's sweet spot for customer size under its new model is midsize businesses and individual departments within large enterprises, Chammings said.

The company expects to serve 300 customers this year. While project sizes typically used to be in the range of $40,000 to $50,000, deals are now reaching the $250,000 to $300,000 range, he said. The company's model is to provide engineering and development services on a contract basis.

Currently, 70 percent of Witekio's revenue is still coming from its existing embedded OEM market. The remaining 30 percent is coming from IoT-focused customers—though the IoT work is growing faster than the OEM work, as expected, according to Chammings.

In a sense, however, the lines between the two markets are blurring, he said.

"A few years back, the embedded and the IT ecosystem were completely isolated worlds -- it was two separate worlds," he said. "With IoT, we see today that the two are merging together."

While Witekio has been entirely self-funded to date, the company — which employs 100 overall — is considering the possibility of raising outside funding to accelerate its growth, Chammings said.