We have just published the results of the first IoT Developer Survey. There are some very interesting findings so I encourage you to check out the report. The raw data is also available [xls] [ods].
Internet of Things (IoT) is still relatively new and not is a lot know about what developers are doing with IoT. Therefore, these results offer an interesting perspective. However with any survey it is just one data point so I always encourage people to look for trends across surveys and year over year trends. That being said I do think there are some key observations we can learn from these results.
1. Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc are key platforms for developers. Over 80% over developers have some experience with these types of hardware platforms. The availability of cheap, accessible hardware is a key enabler to IoT. If you want to get access to IoT developers you need to be enabled on these platforms.
2. Security and Interoperability are key concerns. This is very consistent with other surveys and analysis for IoT. It is interesting to see how the concerns change between developers who have deployed a solution vs developers planning to deploy a solution. For instance, security is a concern to more who are planning to develop in next 6-18 months (60.5%).
3. Open source is pervasive in IoT. Over 80% of developers report their companies have policies use open source software for IoT solutions. This is huge and I think reflects the maturity of open source in the larger technology industry. It also reflects well on our mission for Eclipse IoT.
4. Key IoT languages: Java, C, JavaScript. No one programming language will dominate IoT development. However it does seem Java, C and JavaScript are languages that will be important for any IoT development.
5. Key Standards and Technology: HTTP, MQTT, Linux. HTTP is the dominant message protocol being used by the survey respondents (63%) and Linux is the dominant operating system (78%). For the ‘new’ IoT standards and operating systems, only MQTT (53%) was being used by a majority of the respondents. I think this shows that either 1) the existing web standards and Linux will be good enough for IoT, or 2) the new IoT standards and operating systems have a long way to go towards adoption.
6. Perspective and Influencers for IoT developers. A challenge of IoT is that it is very vast so understanding how IoT developers perceive themselves and who influences their decisions is important. In this survey the respondents identified their technology focus as being focused on Embedded Software, Web Development and Enterprise Software versus Networking, Big Data, Hardware Design or Mobile and Cloud. The key influencers for technology decisions were hardware vendors, semi-conductor manufacturers and Cloud providers versus Network operators, System Integrators or Enterprise software vendors.
I hope these survey results provide some insight into the IoT Developer community. We are going to discuss these results during a Google Hangout on Thursday, April 9 at 11am. Join us.
It is an exciting area for developers and we all have a lot to learn. Thank you to everyone that participated in the survey. I hope this is something we can do on an annual basis.
