VisionMobile has published a report detailing “Four seismic trends that will shake up the IoT market.” One of these is that by 2020, Apple, Google or both will have built a dominant IoT platform that makes head-on competition impossible.
VisionMobile explains: “Established technology companies like IBM, Cisco or GE, and incumbent IoT specialists like Jasper, PTC or Sierra understand the enterprise IoT market very well. But they are not specialists in connecting developers with users. Google and Apple on the other hand have built ecosystem empires with well over 5 million developers combined. Already both companies are active in every major IoT vertical.
“Our Q1 2015 Developer Economics survey of 4,000+ IoT developers shows that their nascent platforms are the most popular and attractive to developers. For Apple and Google, IoT is an extension of their current efforts, not the creation of an entirely new business. This puts them in pole position at the start of the IoT platform race.”
Megatrend number two is equally cataclysmic.
By 2020, new players with new business models will dominate IoT. Most incumbents will be bankrupt, acquired or uncompetitive.
“IoT is a Greenfield market. When new use cases lead to new demand, this new demand is fair game for everyone. The rules of the current market will not apply. New players can appear out of nowhere and overtake incumbents (as Apple and Google did in mobile). New business models can emerge, some of which disruptive to incumbents. Some newcomers might give for free (or at zero profit) what incumbents sell, in a model that boosts demand for their core product. History shows that it will be nigh impossible for incumbents to react effectively.”
Its other two megatrends are:
The most interesting IoT applications in 2020 will use data that already exists today, rather than new sensors.
“Value is created by making sense of data, and many data will have more than one possible source (like in the Waze versus traffic sensor example). New devices will be more expensive to build, install and maintain than solutions that mine existing sources of data. When a solution can be found that doesn’t require new sensors or hardware, it will prevail. Already, companies like Cellint use data from mobile network operators to monitor traffic jams in cities.”
The top IoT platforms in 2020 will be cross-vertical. Sector-specific platforms will be niche or in decline
“If combining more sources of information leads to more opportunities, then limiting platforms to a single vertical is an unhelpful constraint, not a useful focus. If your car pings your thermostat when you’re about to leave from work, is that a Smart Car scenario, or a Smart Home scenario? Both, and neither. It’s a Smart Life scenario. Already, key players like Google, Apple and Samsung are active in all key verticals concurrently.”
I do not know how you could have this conversation and not mention Microsoft, who have massive IoT Cloud investment and even IoT device investment and an army of developers. Also Amazon is another who is investing in IoT Cloud but is arguably lagging the 2 dominant players which are Microsoft and IBM.
Both Apple and Google have very littler headway in IoT except for the consumer and home automation markets, but IoT is much much bigger than that.