Is The IoT Here To Stay?

Look at almost any forecast for the Internet of Things market, and you’ll see some big, impressive numbers. Bain says IoT vendor revenues will top $470 billion by 2020. McKinsey predicts the IoT market will be increasing from last year’s $900 million to $3.7 billion in 2020 for a compound annual growth rate of 32.6%. IHS estimates the number of installed IoT devices will rise from 15.4 billion in 2015 to 30.7 billion in 2020 and 75.4 billion in 2025.

Market research firms define IoT devices and the IoT market in different ways, hence the disparity in certain forecasts.

Since October’s distributed denial-of-service attacks on Dyn, an Internet performance management and Domain Name System services firm which is being acquired by Oracle, consumers are taking a more cautious look at IoT devices, thousands of which were compromised by botnet programs in the big, coordinated cyberattack.

IDTechEx last month issued a report on the IoT, based on conferences, interviews, research, and travel by its analysts, and it was not another glowing forecast. “Our forecasts do not repeat the mantra about tens of billions of nodes being deployed in only a few years. The many analysts sticking to such euphoria ignore the fact that, contrary to their expectation, very little IoT was deployed in 2016,” IDTechEx stated.

And then there was this TechCrunch blog post by Ajay Kulkarni, co-founder and CEO of iobeam, headlined, “There is no IoT.”

He writes, “There is no broad, homogeneous set of applications that we can call IoT. Instead, there are many, varied sets of applications, each enabled by the same tech trends, but manifesting themselves in different ways.”

Clearly, the concept of the IoT may still be viable, yet some people are disappointed in the reality of IoT, which is not coming along as easily and quickly as expected.

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