The Future of the Internet of Things

The “Internet of Things” is a booming sector. Every standard appliance that has sensors and internet capability — like smart refrigerators, wifi in cars, devices on our wrists, and many more — is part of the IoT network.

A report in Business Insider was recently released that analyzed the IoT market, and it highlighted a few interesting points for the future of technology:

In total, we project there will be 34 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020, up from 10 billion in 2015. IoT devices will account for 24 billion, while traditional computing devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, etc.) will comprise 10 billion.

Nearly $6 trillion will be spent on IoT solutions over the next five years.

Businesses will be the top adopter of IoT solutions. They see three ways the IoT can improve their bottom line by 1) lowering operating costs; 2) increasing productivity; and 3) expanding to new markets or developing new product offerings.

Governments are focused on increasing productivity, decreasing costs, and improving their citizens’ quality of life. We believe they will be the second-largest adopters of IoT ecosystems.

Consumers will lag behind businesses and governments in IoT adoption. Still, they will purchase a massive number of devices and invest a significant amount of money in IoT ecosystems.

General Electric is a leader in industrial IoT. Recently, GE announced that its IoT platform would run on Microsoft’s cloud.

The partnership will allow Predix customers to access Microsoft Azure capabilities such as natural language processing, artificial intelligence, data visualization and integration with Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of online workplace productivity apps and other software. A developer preview will be released toward the end of the year and the platform will be released commercially by the second quarter of 2017.

As large corporations and startups focus on building next-generation platforms, connected devices will transform large, global industries — healthcare, smart cities, advanced manufacturing, transportation, and logistics.