12 Predictions for the IoT Market in 2018
The IoT market matured considerably in 2017. In this series of predictions, we take a look at how the industry will continue to grow up next year, while also consolidating.
2015 was a year of education for IoT, where the enterprise sector learned what the technology could offer to their organization on a theoretical basis. In 2016, most companies began to get a sense of the tangible benefits the technology could provide them. This year was the year IoT scaled — often extending beyond the awareness of many workers. But what will 2018 hold for the technology? Next year, expect IoT technology to become both more common, but less obvious. The number of connected devices, as well as IoT-driven projects, will continue to expand, but the technology itself will begin to become something like electricity — technology professionals rely on for their own operations and service offerings, but don’t necessarily think about. Instead, expect buzzwords like “digital transformation” and “digitalization” that include IoT as a component to gain ground — driven by vendors and analysts, along with industry-specific terminology such as “smart manufacturing” and “precision agriculture.”
To get a sense of additional trends on the horizon next year, we reached out to several professionals and came up with a dozen predictions. We touched on a variety of trends, ranging from the likely consolidation of the IoT platform market to the rise of IoT-enabled services.
1. IoT markets will consolidate and grow more integrated
In 2017, the number of IoT platforms surged to more than 450. According toMachNation, IoT platform revenue increased 116 percent in 2017. It is likely, however, in the coming year, some of the smaller IoT platforms will begin to fall away or merge with rival platforms. This trend will likely be similar to the search engine market in the 1990s. The market doesn’t need hundreds of specialized platforms that are nevertheless similar in function.
It is doubtful the IoT platform market will consolidate to anywhere close to the extent of the search engine market given the wide variation of IoT deployments across a diverse set of industries, ranging from aviation to healthcare. It is probable that, in 2018, the number of IoT platforms could begin a steady slide southward, perhaps shrinking from 450 down to around 100 or so, said Nitesh Arora, marketing leader at Cloudleaf.
Successful platforms will tend to be generic for IoT deployments from large tech vendors that support custom deployments. There also will be a vital role for specialized IoT platform vendors targeting niche industries. But many industrial companies are looking for a single IoT platform they can use for asset tracking and management. Fragmented IoT platforms will thus fall by the wayside.
Dave McCarthy, director of products at Bsquare, forecasts a move away from platforms to IoT driven applications. “Businesses will continue to create use-case based applications that solve specific business problems to maximize IoT outcomes,” McCarthy said.
Consolidation and continued integration will also be prevalent in the consumer realm in 2018, as the public begins to deploy a growing number of connected devices, yet grows weary of having to install specific apps for each new device they purchase. There is already evidence of this trend as two companies — Amazon and Google — have emerged as leaders of the smart home market, prompting the majority of smart home companies to integrate with those companies’ respective voice assistant platforms.
Smart home companies unable to create recurring revenue models will fail, said Patrick Maloney, the CEO ofInspire. Despite substantial advances in the smart home space, the market will likely consolidate, given the crowded marketplace and lack of differentiation of smart home products. These factors make it difficult to maintain long-term growth, Maloney said.
