The results of our first IoT Commercial Adoption survey tell a clear story about what organizations are doing with IoT right now and their plans for production deployments. The goal of the survey was to go beyond the IoT Developer Survey we’ve conducted for the last six years to gain insight into the industry landscape from the point of view of a broader spectrum of IoT ecosystem stakeholders.
Here are some of the key findings from the survey:
- IoT may well live up to the hype, if somewhat slower than expected. Just under 40 percent of survey respondents are deploying IoT solutions today. Another 22 percent plan to start deploying IoT within the next two years.
- IoT investment is on the rise, with 40 percent of organizations planning to increase their IoT spending in the next fiscal year.
- Open source pervades IoT as a key enabler with 60 percent of companies factoring open source into their IoT deployment plans.
- Hybrid clouds lead the way for IoT deployments. Overall, AWS, Azure, and GCP are the leading cloud platforms for IoT implementations.
The Commercial Perspective Is Crucial
The survey asked respondents to identify the requirements, priorities, and challenges they’re facing as they deploy and start using commercial IoT solutions, including those based on open source technologies. The survey ran for two months last fall and received responses from more than 360 individuals from a wide range of industries and organizations. You can read the full survey results here, and I would encourage IoT ecosystem players to do that.
IoT Ecosystem Players Must Focus on Real-World Requirements
As our survey results revealed, each player in the IoT ecosystem has an important role in driving IoT adoption. Here are some key takeaways broken down by stakeholder group.
- Software vendors should incorporate open source technologies into their solutions to give customers the flexibility and control they need.
- IoT platform vendors should build offerings that support hybrid cloud environments to become more responsive to customer requirements. At least part of the reason multi-cloud adoption is still in its early stages is because — not surprisingly — the leading cloud providers don’t offer their IoT platform services on other cloud platforms.
- IoT solution providers should be prepared for extensive and intensive proofs of concept and pilot projects before they get to the stage of full production rollouts. With companies reluctant to invest heavily in IoT before they’re confident in the return on investment, these practical and tangible demonstrations will be key to encouraging broader adoption.
- Manufacturing organizations should implement IoT solutions that tie automation, asset management, and logistics together. The most innovative organizations will also rely on IoT technologies to improve their value proposition to customers, for example, by including preventive maintenance features on manufacturing equipment.
Get Involved in Eclipse IoT
It will take a diverse community co-developing a uniform set of building blocks based on open source and open standard to drive broad IoT adoption. If you’re interested in participating in the industry-scale collaboration happening at the Eclipse IoT Working Group or contributing to Eclipse IoT projects, please visit https://iot.eclipse.org/.
As an added benefit of membership, Eclipse IoT Working Group members receive exclusive access to detailed industry research findings, including those from the annual IoT Developer Survey, which are leveraged by the entire industry.
The 2020 IoT Developer Survey is coming soon. If you’d like to contribute questions or provide feedback, join the working group mailing list here.