Survey: Less than 40% of companies are deploying IoT – Technologist

The commercial adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) is real and growing, though not as fast as the hype might suggest, according to the new survey issued this week by Eclipse Foundation, an open source organisation focusing on IoT.

Entitled “IoT Commercial Adoption Survey”,  the results showed less than 40% of those polled online are deploying IoT solutions today and another 22% plan to start deploying IoT within the next 2 years.

The nearly two-month survey between October 7 and December 2 last year involved 366 people worldwide from a range of industries, 31% of whom are from Asia-Pacific.

The objective of survey was to gain a better understanding of the IoT industry landscape by identifying the requirements, priorities, and challenges faced by organizations that are deploying and using commercial IoT solutions

“IoT is clearly one of the major technology trends today and a ubiquitous buzzword,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director, Eclipse Foundation. “This survey, which we hope will be the first of an annual tradition, seeks to provide real insights into what organisations are doing with the IoT right now and their plans for production deployments.”

Cautious approach

Companies are hesitant to heavily invest in IoT before seeing a return on investment, with 30% of survey respondents planning to spend under US$100,000 next year. However, if the 7% of companies planning to spend $1M-$10M are an indication, the money will follow.

Indeed, the survey already showed that IoT investment is growing as 40% of organisations plan to increase their spending on the technology in the next fiscal year. Many of these companies keen on increased IoT deployments come from “heavy” industries such as  energy management, building automation and smart cities.

Clearly, IoT is a powerful ally in the fight against climate change, since these industries can contribute to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Open source rules IoT

Another key takeaway from the survey is the important role open source is set to play in the IoT market, with  60% of companies factoring open source into their IoT deployment plans. According to Eclipse Foundation, this means clearly means the dominant IoT platforms in the market will either be open source or based on an open source core.

IoT and open source practitioners echoed this major insight from the survey.

“This new survey aligns with our own insights into the IoT industry and how organizations are embracing open IoT platforms and commercial offerings based on open source,” said Anita Bunk, Bosch.IO’s open source advocate and head of Marketing, Associate and Technical Communications.

She added: “We are seeing growing interest in our Bosch IoT Suite offering that is built upon Eclipse IoT open source. Our customers benefit from the open and transparent development that accelerates their ability to deliver real business outcomes.”

Deborah Bryant, senior director, Open Source Program Office at Red Hat, said: This survey is one of the first to truly tap into what industry leaders are actually doing about IoT right now. The results highlight the important role of open source software in helping companies achieve their goals. This should be a wake-up call for any organization that has yet to evaluate solutions based on open standards and open source technologies as part of their IoT plans.”

Meanwhile, other key takeaways from the survey include:

• Hybrid IoT cloud strategies dominate (i.e. composed of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures such as private and public) at 26%. Private/on-premises cloud infrastructure ranks a close second at 22%, with public cloud at 20%. Multi-cloud comes in at just under 10%.
• Overall, AWS, Azure, and GCP are the leading IoT cloud platforms for IoT implementations.
• Per device (21%), hybrid (17%), and per CPU/node (8%) are the top 3 preferred pricing models for consuming IoT platform services.
• The fact that less than 40% of respondents identified artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as concerns of high importance to them shows that it is still early days for that segment of the market. It is possible that most organisations do not have the right skill sets to leverage AI/ML internally.
• Data security (26%), performance (19%), data collection and analytics (17%) are the top 3 concerns for deploying IoT solutions.