In March 2017, market research firm Ovum released a list of essential Internet of Things trends for 2017, in collaboration with Internet of Things World. That seemed like a good opportunity to cover some major key IoT trends and predictions too.
We tackle the 5 essential Internet of Things (IoT) trends worth watching in the overall Internet of Things market according to the the organizers of Internet of Things World 2017 and Ovum, add some context and comments and, while we were at it, add over a dozen IoT trends.
First things first: the 5 IoT trends as reported by the two mentioned parties. Ovum stresses that 2016 was an important year for the Internet of Things but that 2017 is even more important and disruptive, both for the IoT technology players and the many industries where IoT projects are being deployed.
In fact, here is already one IoT trend we can add: based on data regarding the increasing maturity, scalability and deployment of effective IoT projects, beyond the proof of concept stage, this move towards scalable IoT projects is an IoT trend for 2017 for sure. That was our IoT trend number 1.
Today, the majority of ‘significant and disruptive’ IoT trends as Ovum puts it are still mainly happening in industrial settings such as manufacturing (Industry 4.0), transportation and utilities, certainly from an IoT spending perspective. Other IoT projects relate to automotive, retail, consumer IoT, ad hoc IoT-enabled smart city projects and so forth. Moreover, cross-industry IoT use cases and deployments are on the rise and will rise even more in 2017 which is IoT trend number 2.
Taking all this into account and without further ado a look at those five key IoT trends for 2017, as reported by Ovum and Internet of Things World 2017.
The first key IoT trend for 2017, according to Ovum (that’s IoT trend number 3 in our list so far) is the fact that LPWA(N) goes mainstream and is poised to support far more Internet of Things use cases.
The announcement doesn’t mention Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies in the unlicensed spectrum such as LoRa and Sigfox, to name just two. Ovum and Internet of Things World 2017 rather point out Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and LTE-M (Long Term Evolution for Machines). In other words: Ovum emphasizes the cellular LPWA evolutions or the two standards which have been standardized within the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project).