Around 40 per cent of organizations are deploying IoT solutions already and a further 22 per cent planning to deploy in the next two years. But the rate of adoption is slower than expected, according to open-source IoT group the Eclipse Foundation.
The same percentage that are in deployment-phase (39 per cent) are either without plans at all (10 per cent) or else in the dark about them (29 per cent).
The non-profit Eclipse Foundation polled 366 individuals, mostly developers in small enterprises, from “a broad set of industries and
organizations” at the end of last year, it said, to get a handle on the state of IoT development in the wider market.
The survey found that “caution rules in the IoT market”. Thirty per cent of organizations will spend less than $100,000 in the next year, it said – the smallest budget amount in the survey. Twelve per cent will spend either more than $1 million (seven per cent) or even more than $10 million (five per cent); 43 per cent don’t have a clue about IoT budgets.
Even so, investments are rising, with 40 per cent planning to increase spending in the next fiscal year. Open source pervades, at least among those surveyed; 60 per cent are considering open-source only (23 per cent) or a combination of open source and proprietary solutions (37 per cent).
But, equally, more than half (51 per cent) of respondents are looking at either proprietary-only (14 per cent) solutions or a combination of open source and proprietary (see above).
Hybrid clouds lead the way for IoT deployments, with 26 per cent of deployments, compared with private cloud in 22 per cent of cases, public cloud in 20 per cent, and multi-cloud in 10 per cent. AWS (37 per cent share), Microsoft Azure (31 per cent), and Google Cloud Platform (27 per cent) are the leading cloud platforms for IoT implementations.
The top concerns are data security (for 26 per cent of respondents), performance (19 per cent), and data collection and analytics (17 per cent).
Mike Milinkovich, executive director at the Eclipse Foundation, commented: “IoT is clearly one of the major technology trends today and a ubiquitous buzzword. This survey, which we hope will be the first of an annual tradition, seeks to provide real insights into what organizations are doing with the IoT right now and their plans for production deployments.”
The Eclipse Foundation has around 275 members, including industry leaders who value open source as a key enabler for business strategy. It is home to over 375 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, and frameworks for IoT, edge computing, automotive, geospatial, systems engineering, and others.
