Helping Jabil clients build future-proof IoT products
Summary
Jabil wanted to help its clients bring IoT-enabled products to market faster without locking themselves into proprietary platforms. We helped Jabil develop a lean, technology-agnostic approach to IoT product development built on modular, open-architecture services.
The challenge
Jabil, a $30B contract manufacturing business, builds products for hundreds of major brands across industries including healthcare, packaging, smartphones, cloud equipment, automotive, and home appliances. As clients increasingly explored Internet of Things (IoT) products, Jabil saw an opportunity to provide value beyond manufacturing.
For many companies, however, IoT adoption came with significant risk. Closed, proprietary platforms could speed up initial implementation, but they often created long-term vendor lock-in, limited flexibility, and made it expensive to adopt better technologies later. Choosing the wrong architecture could leave a client stuck with an inferior and more costly product.
Jabil was in a unique position to advise clients without bias toward any one IoT platform, but many clients still viewed the company primarily as a manufacturer rather than as a strategic innovation partner. Jabil needed a practical way to demonstrate a different model — one that showed clients how to build IoT products faster, more affordably, and with greater long-term flexibility.
The solution
We helped Jabil establish a lean, open-architecture approach to IoT product development that prioritized speed, modularity, and freedom from vendor lock-in.
Instead of relying on closed, proprietary ecosystems, we broke IoT capabilities into 21 modular microservices built around well-defined APIs. These services covered a wide range of use cases, from digital product registration and QR-based workflows to predictive maintenance, AI, and machine learning. This allowed clients to select only the services that matched their product and business needs, rather than buying into an entire platform.
Our approach typically involved:
- Working with clients to identify where IoT could create value within their product portfolio
- Determining which IoT microservices best supported those business needs
- Developing proof-of-concept prototypes and demonstrating them quickly
- Gathering feedback from users and refining prototypes based on what they learned
This lean-agile model enabled much faster experimentation than traditional enterprise IoT programs. Rather than waiting 18–24 months for a first working product, Jabil’s clients could see an MVP in as little as 2–3 weeks. Because the architecture was modular and based on open standards, clients could evolve their products over time without waiting on a single platform vendor to extend its ecosystem.
By decentralizing IoT product development in this way, Jabil’s clients gained speed, lower costs, and greater flexibility. At the same time, Jabil strengthened its position as a strategic innovation partner in the IoT manufacturing market.
The results
- Built and demonstrated open-architecture IoT prototypes for six Jabil clients
- Reduced Jabil’s R&D cycle time from 18 months to six weeks by introducing lean-agile hardware development practices
- Reduced prototype costs from more than $1M to less than $100,000
- Helped position Jabil as a recognized leader in IoT manufacturing