Revenues from internet-of-things (IoT) device management will top $20.5 billion within five years, with 70 per cent coming in the industrial, automotive, and telematics sectors, according to ABI Research.
Revenues from device management services – including device provisioning, software and firmware updates, and device monitoring – will remain constant as a percentage of overall device and application platform revenues through the forecast period, to 2023, it predicted.
The rise in both device management and broader network orchestration is scheduled as enterprise IoT functions become more sophisticated, and computing moves to the edge of industrial IoT networks. As-a-service management solutions will become crucial in industrial IoT settings, ABI said.
“As IoT solutions continue to shift toward performing more processing and computing at the edge, devices need to constantly be updated to maintain solution security and improve overall analytics solution value,” said ABI Research analyst Ryan Harbison.
“If a device is not able to be updated, its long-term value ceases. As a result, operations teams need central tools such as device management solutions to enable efficient remote maintenance. With potentially hundreds or thousands of devices in a solution, it is simply not feasible to fix and update devices after they are deployed.”
Harbison suggested value will be increasingly extracted from device management services when they are bundled as part of more comprehensive enterprise IoT solutions, and increasingly where single providers are responsible for all the component parts.
“The companies that are succeeding in this space are not pure-play device management providers, but are rather those that integrate their offerings with other IoT solution components,” he said.
New solutions from tech providers and automation specialists for edge computing are conspicuous. This week, Dell and Microsoft launched an integrated IoT offering to simplify management, enhance security and reduce the cost of edge devices in industrial settings. The solution is targeted at predictive maintenance and supply chain monitoring, among industrial IoT use cases.
Nokia unveiled a new cloud data centre for edge computing last month, supporting industrial automation functions and on-site data processing. Separately, Swiss firm ABB has partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to launch a new micro-modular data centre to handle data processing at the network edge in smart factory environments.
