For all the hard work and big talk, the IoT market has struggled to deliver on its grand promise of ‘massive’-scale industrial change. Make no mistake; IoT sensing, married with AI sense-making, is the means to digital transformation – and the way to industrial revolution. IoT was supposed to be the tech movement that changed the world, by connecting machines, processes and people, and making enterprises smarter, greener and richer.
It was supposed to make the world better, in other words. And it was supposed to be easy – cheap to connect and quick to scale. Ericsson and Cisco said a decade ago the IoT market would reach 50 billion connected devices by 2020. That deadline has come and gone; the Swedish vendor’s last state-of-the-market review said there were a quarter of that number (12.4 billion) at the end of 2020, and there will be about half (26.4 billion) by 2026.
But the lion’s share in the period – as much as three quarters – will use shorter-range tech like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, not optimized for the kinds of battery-operated fit-and-forget solutions…