Globally, 63 percent of companies involved in Internet of Things projects are “seeing significant returns on investment,” says Britain-based telco Vodafone.
The supplier and network recently published its annual state-of-the-IoT industry report that it calls an IoT barometer. Vodafone interviewed 1,100 business executives around the world via Machina Research to try to gauge companies’ participation in IoT.
Budgets are increasing, the vendor says. Almost all companies (89 percent) say they are increasing IoT spend, with many (76 percent) believing the tech genre “will be critical to their success,” the report says.
“IoT is being used to drive business change,” according to the report. Incredibly, 37 percent of those businesses that have adopted IoT say they now run their entire business on it. Almost half (48 percent) believe their use of IoT will “support large-scale business transformation.”
Other findings include that there is now a synergy between IoT and “cloud, mobile, analytics and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).”
ERP is management software that enterprises use for administrative tasks, such as those related to technology and human resources.
That synergy is manifested through 90 percent of IoT “adopters” integrating IoT with cloud and so on. And that shows in the budgets. IoT spending makes up 24 percent of IT budgets, whereas cloud and hosting are close to that with 23 percent. Analytics comes in at 22 percent, and mobility is at 23 percent. All even, then.
Vodafone Group owns, operates and partners mobile networks in numerous countries, but it also has a telco and IT services arm called Vodafone Global Enterprise, which is involved in IoT. That division produced the report, which is its fourth annual.
