We want to make sure that we always have our finger on the pulse of how today’s organizations are using IoT and edge computing technologies, and the challenges they face in doing so. The third edition of the IoT and Edge Commercial Adoption Survey Report tells us some very interesting things.
Here are some of the key findings from the survey:
- IoT technologies are being adopted at an accelerated rate. 53% of respondents currently deploy IoT solutions and an additional 24% plan to deploy within the next 12 to 24 months, while 18% are currently evaluating deployments.
- Edge computing adoption is also on the rise. 53% of organizations are either utilizing or planning to utilize edge computing technologies within 12 months. Another 20% are currently evaluating the use of edge deployments.
- There is a shift towards higher investments into IoT & Edge. 23% of respondents project spending between $100K - $1M in 2022, growing to 33% in 2023. 10% anticipate spending over $10M and growing to 12% in 2023.
- There is a trend towards a larger number of IoT & Edge assets managed per deployment. Deployments of fewer than 1K managed assets will remain steady or decline, while larger deployments are on the rise. In terms of asset implementation, 52% are a mix of both greenfield and brownfield.
- More organizations now see IoT and edge as strategic, with spending decisions being driven at the executive level 38% of the time. This increased by 3% compared to the year 2021.
- 73% of organizations factor open source into their deployment plans. This clearly demonstrates that the dominant IoT & edge platforms will either be open source or based on open source. Only 27% of organizations using IoT and Edge technologies state they do not use open source technologies.
But what does all this mean? What does it imply about what organizations are doing and how they’re going to do it?
IoT and Edge Technologies Are Here to Stay
One of the major takeaways these results point to is how mature the IoT and edge spaces have become. Enterprises are no longer just experimenting with these technologies anymore, and investment and adoption are continuing to grow, and grow quickly.
As a result, the market has become much more dynamic than it was even a few years ago. If you’re in the market for commercial solutions, there are more players to choose from, but from an open source perspective it means that our projects are increasingly mature. Every year we have more contributors, and we have more bugs fixed.
So, if you’re not working on IoT and edge, now is the time to start. If you are an adopter, now is a good time to consider implementations. The current maturity of the open source building blocks means you can build solutions on top of them with increased confidence. This is really one of the key ways open source fits into the edge and IoT paradigm: it gives you lots of room to innovate at the top, so to speak, focusing on what differentiates your product.
Open Source Helps Tackle Connectivity, Security, and Analytics
The key advantage of open source is that it lets you customize your solutions to the needs of your customers, but it’s not the only one. It also helps tackle those three major challenges in edge and IoT: connectivity, security, and data collection and analytics.
With so many options now available, connectivity is a constant issue. But because open source provides this common building block, it becomes much easier to bolt new technologies that enable connectivity onto it, rather than being stuck with a commercial product with limited support.
Security is a moving target, and always will be. With that in mind, a well-maintained open source technology makes it much easier to stay up to date with the chain of dependencies involved in a given codebase.
And of course, edge and IoT devices gather and analyze huge amounts of data. Machine learning and AI are powerful tools for this, and most of the leading solutions in the space are open source.
Get Involved at the Source
If you’re interested in participating in industry-scale collaboration in open source IoT and edge technologies, please visit Eclipse IoT and the Edge Native Working Group to get involved. As an added benefit of membership, Eclipse IoT and Edge Native members receive early and exclusive access to detailed industry research findings and expert guidance. And, of course, you can download the complete results of the 2022 IoT and Edge Commercial Adoption survey today.
