You hear a lot – make that an awful lot – about the Internet of Things (IoT) these days. Whatever can be connected to the ‘net will be connected to the ‘net – if it isn’t already. No industry or application area seems immune to it. Healthcare. Childcare. Pet care. The stoves we cook on, the pans we cook in. The cars we drive in or – coming soon, you believe the hype – the cars we’re passively sitting in while the cars drive us. Actually, now that I think of it, we won’t be sitting passively in those cars. We’ll be on an IoT device, doing something else. Maybe even shopping for a new car.
From both a professional and personal point of view, I find this all very exciting – even though I do have a number of what I consider common-sense reservations about privacy and security (which I do believe will be resolved over time).
Forbes, in a recent article by Louis Columbus, had an excellent roundup of IoT forecasts and market size estimates. Here’s the direct link.*
A few things standout.
One is Cisco’s prediction that the global market for IoT will have a value of $14.4T by 2022. You read that right: $14.4 TRILLION. This is, of course, a colossal number, but I do need to emphasize that Cisco is talking about what they call Value at Stake:
“…the combination of increased revenues and lower costs that is created or will migrate among companies and industries from 2013 to 2022. • The five main factors that fuel IoE Value at Stake are: 1) asset utilization (reduced costs) of $2.5 trillion; 2) employee productivity (greater labor efficiencies) of $2.5 trillion; 3) supply chain and logistics (eliminating waste) of $2.7 trillion; 4) customer experience (addition of more customers) of $3.7 trillion; and 5) innovation (reducing time to market) of $3.0 trillion.” (Source: Cisco)
(Just want to point out that IoE is not a typo. The Internet of Everything (IoE) is a term that’s now being used by Cisco and others, and is starting to catch hold.)
Whether you look at it by money spent on the IoT/IoE, or the value of money spent/money-time saved, much of the value of is in the Industrial Internet of Things, machine to machine technology that’s used to optimize operations, track inventory, take care of maintenance, etc. City government (public safety, traffic control), transportation (logistics, smart trains, etc.), and healthcare (patient monitoring, virtual medicine, wellness) are other areas that are going to be big. These are the industries with the application areas where Critical Link technology tends to be involved.
Here’s a prediction I’m making on the IoT/IoE: in five years, we won’t be referring to it by a separate name anymore. When we say “computing” or “information technology”, this is what we’ll be talking about.
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Warning: it may not take you there, as Forbes’ links sometimes resolve to the general site URL. The article is worth looking at, and has a number of interesting infographics in it. To find it, you may need to google “Roundup Of Internet of Things Forecasts And Market Estimates, 2015” and click on that link.