It’s that time again to cut through the clutter of marketing messages and explore some real-world implementations for the Internet of Things! As part of our continued effort to track the IoT ecosystem, we once again set out (mining thousands of homepages) to assemble, verify, and classify 1,600 actual enterprise IoT projects in a structured easy-to-use database.
The latest 2018 update of the database is the basis for the 2018 ranking of Top IoT Segments and contains a vast number of further insights hidden in the data, some of which we would like to share with you in this article. (For a comparison, you may look at the 2016 ranking of Top IoT Applications)
Most of the IoT projects we identified are in Smart City (367 projects), followed by industrial settings (265) and Connected Building IoT projects (193). The Americas make up most of those projects (45%), followed by Europe (35%), and Asia (16%). There are large differences when looking at individual IoT segments and regions. The majority of Smart City projects are located in Europe (45%), while the Americas, particularly North America, are strong in Connected Health (55%) and Connected Car (54%). The Asia / Pacific region is particularly strong in the area of Smart Agriculture projects (31%). In comparison to our 2016 ranking, Smart City (driven by government and municipality-led initiatives) has surpassed Connected Industry as the number one IoT segment of identified projects while Connected Building (driven by widespread uptake of building automation solutions that increase operational efficiency and reduce costs) has climbed four places to become the third biggest IoT segment.
Smart City is now the largest IoT segment in terms of number of IoT projects identified (23%), taking over the 2016 number one IoT application area from Connected Industry. The growth has been driven by hundreds of recent Smart City initiatives started by governments and municipalities around the world. Prominent examples include Singapore and the City of Barcelona. The most popular Smart City application is Smart Traffic including projects such as parking systems, traffic monitoring&control, bike sharing, smart bus lanes, but also more exotic applications such as smart ferry systems or smart bus shelters. Other Smart City initiatives evolve around utilities, lighting, environmental monitoring and public safety. Europe accounts for the greatest number of Smart City projects identified (164).