HiveMQ in 2022: Laying the Foundation for a Connected World

As we close out 2022, we’re celebrating a pivotal year – not only for HiveMQ, but for the IoT industry as a whole. We received Series A funding and rapidly expanded our product and service offerings to customers – all with the goal of laying a foundation for reliable, scalable, and secure data movement for a connected world.

As the IoT ecosystem continues to grow and mature, the market is now perfectly aligned to use this valuable data to support business-critical systems and applications. Customers are using the data they move with the HiveMQ platform to realize amazing ROI - both in operational savings, in developing new connected products, and in improving the end- user experience.

Let’s take a look at HiveMQ’s highlights from the past year that facilitated this success.

This year we’ve added many enterprise customers, and some have publicly shared the great success they’ve had with HiveMQ. Tier 1 automotive supplier Rimac Technology joined us for a webinar and explained how they are bringing hyper-connectivity to hypercars. Our technology helps them ingest and analyze vast amounts of data from thousands of sensors in near-real-time from anywhere worldwide while producing a flawless customer experience.

As I mentioned, we closed a €40 Million Series A funding round, bringing our total to €49.3 Million, validating the IoT market opportunity and progress we’ve made since the company was founded in 2012. We already have a premium MQTT platform in place and the funding helps us take our offering to the next level with product feature development and go-to-market expansion.

In 2022 we added enumerable HiveMQ broker features, three I’d like to highlight: the Enterprise Extension for Google Cloud Pub/Sub, the Enterprise Extension for Amazon Kinesis, and the Distributed Tracing Extension. With the first two, we now allow customers to seamlessly integrate data to any of the three cloud providers - Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. The timing was perfect as Google announced the deprecation of their IoT Core offering, and we have filled a gap for many companies. With the Distributed Tracing Extension, HiveMQ is the first MQTT broker to add OpenTelemetry support to provide complete transparency for every published message that uses the HiveMQ MQTT broker.

Looking at 2023 IoT Trends

As I look toward the new year, I see several trends that will allow our customers to capture the full value of their IoT data with HiveMQ.

Accelerated Adoption of IoT Protocols in Industry 4.0

All signs point to MQTT adoption rates continuing to accelerate in Industry 4.0 in 2023. With the recent release of the Sparkplug 3.0 specification and accompanying Technology Compatibility Kit, the door is wide open to advance the adoption of these standards across the globe for more plug-and-play, interoperable IIoT deployments.

I foresee more Sparkplug adoption and an embracing Unified Namespace, a hub and spoke model for data that provides a single source of truth. We just launched our Unified Namespace Essential Guide to help companies adopt this concept moving forward and set up the right industrial architecture for success.

Multi-Cloud Strategies Continue

I said it last year, and I’ll repeat it – we are seeing more customers come to us with a multi-cloud strategy that requires consistent and reliable MQTT messaging across various cloud platforms. For this reason, cloud providers’ proprietary solutions don’t make sense. Customers who want to move to a multi-cloud strategy need a platform-agnostic data movement solution to avoid vendor-lock in and give them a scalable, future-proof strategy that will work for many years.

This is also why we will continue to invest in the HiveMQ marketplace, which is where we provide product extensions that seamlessly integrate HiveMQ with enterprise systems, added security features and more functionality. The HiveMQ extension framework also provides an open API that allows developers to create custom extensions for their specific infrastructure.

Desire for Fully-Managed Services

Enterprise customers and mid-size businesses face the same challenge: technical talent is at a premium. I won’t go into the many factors involved, but many companies are looking for SaaS tools to free up teams to develop their products and services instead of spending time monitoring and supporting infrastructure.

As a result, we’ve seen increased interest in HiveMQ Cloud, which we launched last year with both a self-service and a dedicated option. We will continue to invest heavily to expand the offering in 2023. We’ve onboarded customers who simply don’t have the bandwidth to worry about data movement internally - they want to use the HiveMQ broker without thinking about it. We’ll release the first HiveMQ Cloud customer case study in Q1, a customer who has seen 100 percent uptime as they seamlessly transitioned from on-premise to HiveMQ Cloud. This allowed them to free up engineering resources for higher-priority activities like meeting customer needs.

Full Speed Ahead

Underpinning all these exciting happenings and trends, HiveMQ is committed to helping customers harness the power of their IoT data to deliver new business outcomes. We will continue to focus our efforts on customer needs to ensure predictable data movement so they can gain the data insights they need.

As always, please reach out if you want to discuss these trends or if we can help you with your IoT projects. We’re also growing rapidly, so check out our open positions if you want to help us build a connected world.

Wishing all of you a wonderful holiday season and a successful 2023.