IIoT Survey Shows Deployments Are Still Small and Predominantly Local or Domestic

K. Weldon

Summary Bullets:

• A Current Analysis survey completed in April shows that most IoT deployments are under 2,500 devices regardless of region or company size
• The survey also showed that most deployments are domestic or local; only 28% cross country borders for regional or global use cases.

A comprehensive survey focused on enterprises that have deployed IoT solutions was completed by Current Analysis in April 2016. Among the large number of interesting trends were the relatively small number of devices deployed by respondents and the local nature of most deployments, regardless of company size or region. For example:

• 84% of projects included fewer than 2,500 devices, although 40% of respondents had deployed more than 1,000.
• 18% of respondents with fewer than 100 devices may still be in trial mode, so they may certainly enlarge their deployments in the future.
• Interestingly, these numbers didn’t vary much by region, although 42% of Latin American respondents had deployed more than 1,000 devices (compared, for example, to only 37% of North American or European respondents).
• Correlation with company size was as expected, with the smaller companies generally deploying the fewest number of devices.
• Deployments were dominantly (72%) local, or national. This may be no surprise to mobile operators that are trying to sell multi-national solutions with global SIMs – although this business appears to be growing, truly global deployments are still in the minority. The need to cross country boundaries depends on the use case. For example, managed fleets, consumer devices, and cargo tracking deployments would require regional or global connections.

These trends show that enterprises are still deploying IoT technology a bit cautiously, with relatively small deployments, but other findings in the survey point to diverse use cases, with improved operational efficiency the dominant objective. If these numbers hold, to get to the widely cited 20 billion connections goal by 2020, many more companies will have to buy in to IoT. In addition, enterprises will increasingly come out of trial mode for larger, more complex, and more global deployments with multiple use cases activated by different lines of business within each organization.

As the technology proves itself for each business, by reaching key goals of high return on investment, greater efficiency/productivity, and eventually process and business model transformation, deployments should increase in size, sophistication, and geographic scope.