There is a long and fascinating discussion to be had about how the economics of many industrial sectors are evolving. The short version is hardware differentiation is no longer economically viable, margin is going to zero, and pivoting to sensor analytics and exploitation is broadly seen as the primary means of generating margin going forward. I've had this same conversation across several industrial sectors. Anything tangentially related to transportation (automotive, logistics, telematics, aviation, and all related supply chains) is a good example.

As to what these companies want to do with sensor data, it is often considerably more interesting than what people imagine. Many of the applications have an operational real-time or low-latency tempo. (I can't be too specific here.)

For my purposes, I put "medium-sized" on the order of $1B annual revenue. As to why a company would literally spend 10+% of its revenue on sensor data infrastructure, it is difficult to overstate the extent to which getting this right is viewed as near- to medium-term existential for these companies. The CFO has run the models and this is their best chance at survival.

Here is the interesting thing: to the extent they've been able to put this sensor data infrastructure in place, it has been successful at generating margin. If they could bend the infrastructure cost curve down a bit, most would spend even more on it. I've seen the financial models at several companies, there is a tremendous amount of money to be made in this transformation.