“Solid progress is being made on a number of IoT technologies, tools, and business models.”
IoT trends to watch this year include edge analytics; machine learning; and low-power wide-area networks, according to a report from market research firm Ovum.
“We saw the concept of the IoT go more mainstream in 2016,” said Gavin Whitechurch, founder of Internet of Things World. “There was heavy media coverage of both the positives, for example Wi-Fi in your car and AI assistants in your home, and the negatives including DDoS attacks using IoT devices and poor transparency on data usage,”
“Behind the hype, solid progress is being made on a number of IoT technologies, tools, and business models,” he said. Ovum’s report, “2017 Trends to Watch: IoT,” predicts significant disruption for industries using IoT and the companies that develop IoT technology.
Five IoT trends
LPWA will go mainstream, the report predicts, especially Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and LTE-M will support an increased range of IoT use cases enabling low cost, high battery life and low bandwidth IoT devices for connected homes, smart cities, and more.
IoT diversity: Vendors and service providers will focus on product and services diversification to better meet client needs, but telcos will face a lot of competition in doing so.
Security will become a core focus for both businesses and vendors and it’s been a long time coming. Regulators will see IoT security on their radar and security will be a top priority of deployment discussion.
Edge analytics will become more common. New tools for streaming analytics will be crucial steps toward using IoT data to feed machine learning engines and AI applications.
IoT-as-a-service models will continue to grow in a variety of IoT verticals.
