  The ever-increasing acceleration of technology evolution in all fields is
rapidly changing the architectures of data-driven systems towards the
Internet-of-Things concept. Many general and specific-purpose IoT platforms are
already available. This article introduces the capabilities of the FIWARE
framework that is transitioning from a research to a commercial level. We base
our exposition on the analysis of three real-world use cases (global IoT
market, analytics in smart cities, and IoT augmented autonomous driving) and
their requirements that are addressed with the usage of FIWARE. We highlight
the lessons learnt during the design, implementation and deployment phases for
each of the use cases and their critical issues. Finally we give two examples
showing that FIWARE still maintains openness to innovation: semantics and
privacy.
