Investment in new IoT projects around the world is climbing despite ongoing economic uncertainties, according to new findings from independent analyst firm Omdia.
Despite challenges that include chip shortages, human resource constraints, interest rate rises and inflation, 75% of organisations responding to Omdia’s latest survey said they had invested more than US$500,000 on IoT during 2022, up from 65% for the previous year. In 2020, only 50% of those surveyed had spent this amount or more. Some 16% revealed they had spent more than $5 million in 2022 on implementing IoT-based solutions, up 5% on 2021.
“What we’re seeing is that enterprises are fairly bullish about plans for IoT, represented by a year-over-year increase in spending,” says John Canali, principal analyst for IoT with Omdia, speaking at the recent NetEvents Global Media Summit in San Jose in California where he announced the findings. “Communications service providers, on the other hand, have been struggling to establish their position on the IoT value chain.”
Canali found that a broad range of IoT applications are being deployed at scale across several different verticals, including asset tracking in retail, hospitality and logistics, connected CCTV cameras in the public sector and healthcare, fleet management solutions in agriculture, predictive analytics in manufacturing and remote control of equipment in energy and utilities.
Asked by Omdia about the IoT applications that they expect to be deploying in the future, enterprises said they would be prioritising edge processing of IoT data at the device or gateway level (46%), open APIs to link different IoT services at scale (45%) and the use of 5G to support flexible provisioning and high-bandwidth, low latency wireless connectivity for wireless applications (45%).
“Many enterprises are deploying Private 5G to enhance their IoT projects,” notes Vikas Tandon, AVP of product management & IoT with global carrier Tata Communications, speaking at the same event. “But they must be careful they don’t end up with lots of islands of Private 5G. IoT connectivity has to interwork which demands an overarching network architecture, especially given the explosion in the number of IoT devices we are certain to see.”
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