IoT Investment Trends
The Economist has recently published an IoT survey that looks at the business trends in the IoT industry. This is the third year the Economist has completed this type of survey so they are able to show some interesting trends. There has been some interesting commentary on the survery results.
Some key takeaways:
Rate of Investment is Increasing
Between 2017 and 2020 the rate of investment in IoT has grown substantially. 36% reporting 11–50% increase and 19% reporting greater than 51% growth in IoT investment.
This is good news for IoT vendors that are relying upon this increase growth. It also means companies are seeing real ROI in their IoT investments.
IoT is making an impact on the business
The increased in investment can be attributed to the fact that the IoT projects are having an impact on businesses. An impressive 41% of respondents claim IoT has had a major impact on buisness. 37% expect to have a major impact in the future.
Still Early Days for Extensive Implementations
IoT deployments still appear to be in the early stages. They survey breaks out adoption by internal use of IoT and IoT in external products and services. For internal use, ex. monitoring energy consumption or factory equipment, 22% of companies report extensive use, and only 13% of companies report extensive use for external products and services. However, close to a third of the companies report early implementations for internal and external use and close to half (49%) of companies report external use is only in the research and planning stage.
There appear to be still lots of room for growth for IoT adoption witin these companies.
Final Thoughts
Vendors and customers involved in IoT need to have a long-term view. Implementing IoT applications can be very complicated and take a lot of research, prototyping, and in-house development expertise. The last 5 years have seen a lot of companie in the PoC stage but we are not seeing more and more companies driving real business value. These survey results show companies are achieving real ROI, my experience working with HiveMQ has allowed me to talk with many customers that have deployed business critical IoT systems. We are still in the early days but it really does seem the IoT industry is moving in the right direction.