IOT spending to top $1.1 trillion in 2023 - IDC

IDC has released its Worldwide Semi-annual Internet of Things Spending Guide, which suggests global IOT spend could reach $1.1 trillion in 2023.

The three segments likely to be the biggest contributors to growth are discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing, and transportation, collectively accounting for a third of the total spend worldwide. Operational efficiency seems to be the focus of the manufacturing segments, while freight monitoring is the key for transportation.

“Spending on IoT deployments continues with good momentum and is expected to be $726 billion worldwide this year,” said Carrie MacGillivray of IDC. “While organizations are investing in hardware, software, and services to support their IoT initiatives, their next challenge is finding solutions that help them to manage, process, and analyse the data being generated from all these connected things.”

Of course, while manufacturing and transportation might not be the sexiest part of the IOT world, the consumer segments will see healthy growth also. The smart home and connected vehicle use cases will drive revenues here, with the consumer market expected to become the largest segment post-2023.

For the telcos, an interesting trend to keep an eye on is the increasing spend on IOT services. So far, hardware has dominated the budgets of enterprise customers, which was to be expected, though as the foundations are laid and the business cases are proved, vertical industry IoT platforms and cloud deployments for IoT software are expected to make headway.

“The new Deployment Type segmentation in the IoT Spending Guide draws sharp lines that identify opportunities for software growth via public cloud services,” said Marcus Torchia of IDC. “Segmented at the deepest level, clients can now prioritize strategy planning at the region/country, industry, and use case levels.”