In enterprise IoT, plug-and-play looks like a win for everyone: builders love it because it reduces sales friction, enterprises love it because it lowers the entry barrier. But that shortcut comes at a cost. Builders get locked into maintaining an opaque black box, and enterprises discover that the default configuration doesn’t fit their processes or scale in their IT landscape.

The real art is mastering your IoT-specific core — in our case, the LoRaWAN Network Server — while enabling deep integration into existing systems. That’s why we offer The Things Stack as a Kubernetes deployment: instead of selling a black box, we let enterprises run our core where it belongs — inside their carefully managed IT infrastructure.

In this keynote, I’ll share how to escape the plug-and-play trap, why openness beats magic in enterprise IoT, and how deploying on Kubernetes illustrates the kind of integration that makes IoT software survive and scale.