A new forecast from Machina Research—which claims to be the world’s leading provider of strategic advice on the newly emerging Internet of Things, M2M and big data market—puts the IoT market opportunity at $US4.3 trillion in 2024 up from $US900m in 2014, saying that as M2M markets evolve and transform to IoT, they will include greater shares of traditional IT markets, ultimately subsuming them.
Machina Research has identified four main areas where IoT opportunities will emerge from this convergence with IT: applications (provisioning, hosting and developing), platforms (enablement middleware), systems integration and strategy work, and data monetisation and IoT services. These four areas combined will, it says, deliver an IoT market opportunity of $US1.8 trillion by the end of 2024.
It says there is no commonly accepted distinction between the IoT and M2M but has identified a number of characteristics that are definitely changing. These include:
– A significantly greater number of connections to devices and sensors but also to corporate IT systems, other IoT applications, social media, published data feeds, etc.
– A shift from vertically structured, ‘stovepipe’ solutions to open systems nurturing application and data sharing.
– A focus on application development and the reuse of data to create new and innovative services or efficiencies with tangible benefits for enterprises.
It says the four major building blocks of M2M revenue (devices, installation, connectivity and M2M services) will be worth approximately $US2.5 trillion by the end of 2024, and that “even in the exciting new world of IoT, the single biggest revenue opportunity is associated with the one-off revenue from connected device hardware.”
However, it says the IoT opportunity is wider than this. “To enable the level of application and data management implicit in the IoT, traditional IT areas such as system integration (professional services), data centre systems, IT services and enterprise software will become increasingly integrated and aligned with IoT solutions.”
