As we work on our product roadmap, I’ve been doing some market research, and came across some especially interesting material from IDC – International Data Corporation, which provides market research in the tech space. Basically, what they see is that the market for traditional embedded systems will be surpassed, and pretty much taken over by, the market for what they’re calling “intelligent systems.”
My first thought was that the traditional embedded systems that Critical Link’s customers bring to market are pretty darned intelligent – scientific instrumentation, spectroscopy, manufacturing quality… The applications that our “Mity” branded products (including our scientific cameras) are used in are complex. They’re doing computationally rich and interesting work. They’re performing tasks that would take really smart human beings a long time to perform by hand (and with greater accuracy and precision, I might add).
But then I saw IDC’s definition of intelligent systems, which means not just those based on high-performance microprocessors but also with IP connectivity. This does pretty much put our SoMs in the intelligent category. And some of them – like the MitySOM-335x with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth – are pretty much geniuses.
Anyway, for IDC, intelligent systems, which include the Internet of Everything (the Internet of People + the Internet of Things), and machine-to-machine communications, are wildly taking off, with a compound annual growth rate of 24% through 2020. The market is expected to grow from 3.5 billion units this year, to over 5 billion by2017, and 25 billion by 2020. That’s an awful lot of intelligent systems out there…
Also interesting was IDC’s finding that ARM processors are used in roughly one-third of intelligent systems, and Intel based architectures are used in about 10 percent of them.
My key takeaway: Critical Link and our customers are at the heart of this trend, which sure beats being a buggy-whip maker after the Model T Ford was introduced!
The IDC press release where most of the info in this post comes from can be found here. Mario Morales is the IDC analyst who closely follows this space, if you’re interested in finding more about what he has to say.