Automotive, Healthcare & Smart Cities to be IoT-driven

MUMBAI, INDIA: The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) in the enterprise market is slowly gaining momentum.

The findings were published in new report commissioned by Verizon Enterprise Solutions and conducted by ABI Research, titled, State of the Market: The Internet of Things (IoT) 2015: Discover How IoT is Transforming Business Results.

The findings:

The number of business-to-business IoT connections — more than quadrupling between 2014 and 2020 — rising to an estimated 5.4 billion connections globally, will be one of the key growth factors for IoT industry.

In the automotive industry for instance, Verizon’s telematics experts noted that 14 car manufacturers account for 80 percent of the worldwide automotive market, and all of them have a connected car strategy.

Verizon saw a 45 percent year-over-year revenue growth in its IoT business in 2014, with 4G LTE activations growing by 135 percent. The vendor manages more than 15 million IoT-enabled connections across industries.

According to the report, machine-to-machine connections managed by Verizon resulted in growth in 2014. It noted that the manufacturing segment witnessed a whopping 204 percent hike; finance and insurance a 128 percent hike; media and entertainment, 120 percent; home monitoring, 89 percent; retail and hospitality, 88 percent; transportation and distribution, 83 percent; energy and utilities, 49 percent; public sector and smart cities, 46 percent followed by the healthcare and pharmaceuticals industry at 40 percent.

By 2025, smart cities will become a critical consideration for companies deciding where to invest and open facilities, due to their impact on operating costs and talent availability, the report said.

Additionally, ABI Research said that organizations will introduce more than 13 million health and fitness tracking devices into the workplace by 2018.

For instance, the use of social media and mobile technology has transformed consumer and citizen expectations. Plus the declining costs of sensors, connectivity and processing power have made IoT a viable proposition. Changing regulatory requirements are a key influencing factor.

The report also noted that off-the-shelf IoT solutions are now available with greater frequency as a replacement for highly customized solutions, which have historically characterized many enterprise IoT implementations.

Barriers to growth

All is however, not hunky dory in the IoT space. There are barriers as well.

According to the report, 10 percent of enterprises have deployed IoT technologies extensively —many organizations are in a pilot phase or are waiting for more insights from early adopters. This also applies to widely covered categories such as the connected car. According to Verizon’s telematics experts, more than 600 million vehicles worldwide are currently not connected to a network.

While the core technologies powering IoT— sensors, cloud computing, intelligent networking — are familiar to most businesses and public sector organizations, formulating a viable strategy and developing IoT solutions can be highly complex.

And a broader IoT landscape brings greater security challenges. Verizon notes that digital certificates can help address growing C-suite and public concerns and meet regulatory demands around IoT and security.

“New use cases are created every day; however, the business case for IoT and enterprise adoption often gets overlooked,” explained Mark Bartolomeo, Vice President, IoT Connected Solutions, Verizon.

“Within the past year, amid an improving economy, we’ve seen a number of new entrants starting to use IoT as a roadmap to improve their customers’ experiences, accelerate growth and create new business models that are driving societal innovation.”

“As machine-to-machine technology adoption continues to move downstream with millions of endpoints connected, it will change how we see cyber security and privacy,” he said.