According to some extensive research that has recently been conducted by Berg Insight, it is predicted that with the increase in popularity of third-party Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, worldwide revenues will hit €2.4 billion by the end of the decade. The Swedish M2M specialist research company has also predicted that IoT platform sales will increase at a rate of around 32 per cent (compound) up to the year 2020.
This forecast covers the three sectors that the majority of IoT platforms are linked to. These are application enablement, device management and managing connectivity. Berg Insight highlighted that the growth will be pushed by the slow transition of M2M communications to multi-purpose applications that are collaborative, from the old style single-purpose vertical solutions.
A senior analyst at Berg Insight, André Malm, commented that he saw the future for companies around the globe as being linked to third-party solutions. The reasons for this were related to lower costs, development cycles that were a lot shorter, and a much higher level of flexibility than could be achieved using in-house M2M resolutions. Talking about what he envisaged as the future for companies, Mr Malm said: “In the past, companies have often developed M2M solutions where connected devices sent data via a network directly to an application that handled data storage and processing, security and business logic.
“These solutions normally required long development cycles and high cost, with little scalability and flexibility to handle a growing number of devices and evolving functional requirements.”
Mr Malm added that the adoption of IoT third-party platforms is increasing rapidly. This is because firms are becoming more and more aware of the benefits available by going down a third-party platform route, rather than having to “re-invent the functionality in-house.”