Eclipse Foundation Survey: IoT Is Real and Adoption Is Growing

The Eclipse Foundation this week released the results of its first annual "IoT Commercial Adoption Survey." Based on the responses of 366 individual participants, who responded between Oct. 7 and Dec. 2, 2019, the survey uses direct industry feedback to provide a snapshot of the state of the Internet of Things (IoT) industry landscape.

"The Internet of Things is clearly one of the major technology trends today and a ubiquitous buzzword," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a statement. "This survey, which we hope will be the first of an annual tradition, seeks to provide real insights into what organizations are doing with the IoT right now and their plans for production deployments."

The survey was designed to identify "the requirements, priorities, and challenges faced by organizations that are deploying and using commercial IoT solutions," the Foundation said. It delivers insights from enterprises on their decisions regarding IoT growth overall, growth per industry, architectural choices and IoT investment by application. The survey data also includes details on IoT adoption by industry, top concerns by commercial IoT adopters and breakdowns by organizational role.

The survey data leads to a number of conclusions, including:

• IoT is real and adoption is growing, if slower than the hype would indicate. Just under 40 percent are deploying IoT solutions today and another 22 percent plan to start deploying IoT within the next two years.
• Caution rules in the IoT market, with 30 percent of organizations planning to spend less than $100,000 in the next year.
• IoT investment is on the rise, with 40 percent of organizations planning to increase their IoT spending in the next fiscal year.
• Open source pervades IoT with 60 percent of companies factoring open source into their IoT deployment plans.
• Hybrid clouds lead the way for IoT deployments. Overall, AWS, Azure and GCP are the leading cloud platforms for IoT implementations.

"This survey is one of the first to truly tap into what industry leaders are actually doing about IoT right now," said Deborah Bryant, senior director, Open Source Program Office for Red Hat, in a statement. "The survey results highlight the important role of open source software in helping companies achieve their goals. This should be a wake-up call for any organization that has yet to evaluate solutions based on open standards and open source technologies as part of their IoT plans."

The Foundation is gearing up for its 2020 IoT survey. Those interested in contributing questions or providing feedback to that effort are welcome to join the working group mailing list here, the Foundation says.

Posted by John K. Waters on March 12, 2020