Europe Extends Its Lead in the Industrial IoT With Three Times More Extensive Implementations Versus the U.S.
New research from Bain & Company finds that:
Yet, cybersecurity remains a hurdle to greater adoption in both regions. These are results of Bain & Company’s latest survey of more than 600 industrial customers of IoT offerings, detailed in a new report, Europeans Extend Their Lead in the Industrial Internet of Things.
Bain & Company first surveyed executives in Europe and the U.S. two years ago about their plans for deploying industrial use cases for the IoT. The research found that 27 percent of European executives said they planned to deploy IoT solutions compared with just 18 percent of their colleagues in the U.S. Additionally, companies in some European industries said they were devoting more of their IT budgets to the Internet of Things, particularly in automotive, buildings and industrial. In the latest survey, nearly half of executives in these industries in the U.S. said they were planning IoT deployments, on par with their European counterparts.
“The long-term ambitions of industrial executives in Europe and the U.S. appear closely matched,” said Christopher Schorling, a partner in Bain & Company’s European Technology practice.
Meanwhile, companies in the U.S. continue to struggle with implementation issues that the Europeans have mostly addressed. Bain & Company’s most recent research found that U.S. companies plan to ramp up their investments in POC through 2022. Today, about half of all IoT projects in the U.S. are at this stage, but that’s likely to increase to about 70 percent in the next four years.
Bain & Company revealed that cybersecurity is a top concern for both European and U.S. companies. According to the research, 49 percent of European CEOs said cybersecurity was the biggest barrier to IoT adoption. Industrial customers in the U.S. share this concern, but say issues that would bring IoT solutions into the mainstream of their businesses—namely, integration with other operating technology, interoperability, technical expertise and transition risk – are more pressing. U.S. executives were much more likely to cite these concerns in the 2018 survey than in 2016.
