  Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the interconnection of physical objects
via the Internet. It utilises complex back-end systems which need different
capabilities depending on the requirements of the system. IoT has already been
used in various applications, such as agriculture, smart home, health,
automobiles, and smart grids. There are many IoT platforms, each of them
capable of providing specific services for such applications. Finding the best
match between application and platform is, however, a hard task as it can
difficult to understand the implications of small differences between
platforms. This paper builds on previous work that has identified twenty-one
important factors of an IoT platform, which were verified by Delphi method. We
demonstrate here how these factors can be used to discriminate between five
well known IoT platforms, which are arbitrarily chosen based on their market
share. These results illustrate how the proposed approach provides an objective
methodology that can be used to select the most suitable IoT platform for
different business applications based on their particular requirements.
