IoT is catching on. Research conducted by Vodafone found that 34% of businesses now use the technology and that 70% of those are beyond the pilot stage. Almost all of them — 95% — are seeing benefits.
The results were part of the carrier’s latest IoT Barometer, which featured 1,758 businesses. The impact is profound, claim the researchers. “We surveyed organisations across many sectors and we found IoT is having a profound impact across the board,” according to the executive summary of the report. “For example, 86% of adopters in automotive are using or plan to use IoT to increase revenue and differentiate their products. And 84% of insurance adopters say their business strategy has changed as a result of IoT.”
IoT Benefits for Businesses
The report is full of interesting numbers. For instance, 60% of adopters say that IoT will have completely disrupted their industry in five years’ time and 87% of the most sophisticated adopters say they have seen significant returns. The report found a wide range of use cases and noted that the IoT impacts businesses of all sizes. The firm also found that 84% of adopters have a growing confidence and 83% are enlarging their deployments. Seventy-six percent of adopters say their IoT projects are mission critical and one in 12 says that their “entire business now depends on IoT.”
The reported ranked business’ IoT usage by looking at strategy, integration and implementation. Fifty-three percent of all adopters fall into the top two levels of five the report established. In the Americas – the most advanced region – 67% of adopters are in the top two levels, with 51% in APAC and 46% in Europe falling into those tiers.
The report found that 87% of top-level companies report significant returns or benefits from IoT, while only 17% in the beginners’ level do so.
One of the key elements of the IoT is that growth will only be limited by the imagination of organizations and their developers. In an effort to stimulate ideas, AT&T, Arrow Electronics and Indiegogo early this year partnered on the Arrow Certification Program. The idea is to use the crowdsourcing site to generate IoT ideas. The top concepts will partner with AT&T in various ways and be certified by Arrow.
Image courtesy of flickr user DennisM2.
