A new survey by Machina Research shows acceleration in the pace of adoption of IoT by US companies, as they increasingly recognise the commercial benefits associated with implementation. This growing importance is also having a knock-on effect on budgets, with IoT increasingly setting the agenda for IT.
Machina Research, the world’s leading provider of IoT market research and advisory services, today announced the results of its latest enterprise survey, which focuses on adoption trends and dynamics for US companies implementing IoT solutions. The study, conducted in July 2016, reveals a growing and complex market for enterprise IoT solutions.
The results show that 38% of US companies are actively using IoT solutions today, predominantly for reasons of competitive advantage, and 81% of will have deployed by end 2018. As IoT projects gain strategic weight, spending on solutions will quickly grow, comprising 43% of IT budgets by 2020. The quick pace of enterprise IoT implementations coincides with a growing acceptance that data generated from connected things has strategic value in many aspects of the enterprise including product development, customer service, operations, and finance, among others.
Commenting on the study, author Andy Castonguay said:
“US companies are swiftly embracing IoT solutions in many facets of their organizations and this trend just grows more dynamic with each year.”
“With the vast majority of US companies expecting to have IoT solutions in place by year-end 2018, the coming years will be a remarkable period of opportunity for the IoT vendor community to help companies integrate IoT into their operations and products. As one of the world’s leading IoT markets, the US remains an important indicator of global IoT adoption in developed economies, so the global ramifications of these results are highly encouraging.”
IoT still broadly sits within the remit of IT, with all the associated issues. IT executives are typically those responsible for leading IoT strategy decisions (at 54% of companies) and implementation (at 61% of companies). As a result it is unsurprising that 70% of short-term IoT investment will address the complexities of integrating IoT solutions with legacy operational, resource management, and CRM systems.
While most companies report that IoT solution development is internally led, 48% of companies look to systems integrators and software platform companies as trusted partners in the design and execution of the projects. This underscores one of the key concerns that companies have about IoT projects: complexity of implementation. While security remains the top enterprise concern about adopting IoT solutions, the complexities of integration and implementation represent key challenges to the IoT adoption process, which is further complicated by a highly fragmented ecosystem of solution vendors and relevant technologies.
Despite the common challenges of IoT solution implementation, the survey confirms that enterprises increasingly view IoT solutions and the associated data as crucial tools to understand product performance, gain insights into customer usage behavior, and provide both product development and customer service organizations with important, data-driven feedback that can drive further improvements in product design and customer engagement. While just 15% of companies currently leverage IoT data in this manner, a full 69% of participating companies report that they have plans to develop this kind of data reporting mechanisms for their products and systems, underscoring the value of IoT-generated data in their businesses.
