IoT is some ways new “branding” for the dramatic improvements in M2M, SCADA, consumer behavior tracking, automation and other solutions now possible. This is more than hype, and with all of the advancements mentioned in earlier discussion, IoT takes end to end connectivity to new levels and enables us to capture dramatically more value for business, industry and consumers.
Validation that this is really game changing comes from a look at where IoT is already bringing new and impactful economic value across industries in real world deployments. And from there, we can also better see where IoT is likely to take us to capture still more value.
Industrial IoT – Industrial IoT is a very broad category that includes manufacturing, aerospace, defense, healthcare, energy, transportation, robotics, mining and other broad categories. While IoT has seen a lot of hype for consumers around smart homes, lifestyle/health care items such as FitBit, or even Google Glass, in the near term the most economic benefit of IoT will come from industrial deployments. Heavyweight multinationals such as IBM, Cisco, Intel, AT&T and General Electric formed the Industrial Internet Consortium to accelerate standards alignment and enable a smoother development of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) market. The economics of this sector jump off the page with estimates of some 26 billion devices connected by 2020.
The following chart from Gartner provides their estimated breakdown of the value created by IoT by the year 2020:
