Where are we heading with IoT ?

The Internet of Things is a new paradigm that plays a fundamental role in the evolution of the future Internet. Daily life objects, or things, are provided with processing and communication features with Internet connectivity creating a distributed network of devices. Such devices are able to interact with humans and with each other while generating a large amount of heterogeneous data. Over the years, different approaches for processing data items have been developed, in order to exploit new innovations.

The progress of technology has allowed the emergence of this new paradigm, but, on the other hand, there are still many challenges that have to be addressed when developing applications of this type, because of energy and computational limitations due to the kind of device type and so on. The existing approaches for data and event-processing range from completely centralized solutions, including Cloud Computing, to fully-distributed ones.

The broader context of IoT platforms The basic IoT stack generally has three layers:

• IoT infrastructure

IoT infrastructure contains all required components to connect devices and machines to the Internet. This includes, for example, sensors and actors within these devices, but also network components such as gateways and embedded software on devices.

• IoT platforms

IoT platforms form the layer connecting the IoT infrastructure layer and the IoT application layer.

• IoT applications

IoT applications are built to provide a solution for specific IoT use cases. This can, for example, be a predictive maintenance solution for a specific machine.

The purpose of an IoT platform is to manage the underlying IoT infrastructure, create and manage IoT applications, and orchestrate the IoT dataflow between IoT infrastructure and IoT applications. To fulfill this purpose, IoT platforms have to provide two kinds of functionality to clients:

• IoT device management covers device provisioning, device connectivity, remote SW updates, and remote control.

• IoT application management includes application development & integration, data management, analytics & artificial intelligence (AI), data visualization, and event processing.

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Market consolidation

The world of IoT platforms today is more complicated than the above-mentioned. The market for IoT platforms for developers is still more fragmented than the market for IoT platforms for non-developers. There are four different market segments where providers offering different kinds of IoT platforms with different capabilities:

1. IoT platforms for analytics applications focus on the enablement of developers to build more complex IoT applications such as predictive maintenance. For this purpose, an IoT platform has to provide deep capabilities around data analytics, artificial intelligence, application integration, and application development.

2. IoT platforms for device management supports IT specialists with the critical management of complex device fleets on a large scale. From a functional perspective, besides device provisioning, these platforms mainly focus on centrally managed software updates at the device level (for security or functional reasons), but also remote configuration and control of devices.

3. IoT platforms for device development are designed to manage IoT operating systems on embedded devices (embedded SW on constrained devices). This market will particularly be driven by the advent of a new range of lightweight IoT devices (based on microcontrollers with embedded SW) that communicate directly with an IoT platform via LPWAN technology (LoRA, Sigfox, NB-IoT), enabling security updates over the air on a large scale for many small devices out in the field. IoT platforms for non-developers

4. IoT platforms for rapid application deployment allow simple and fast device connectivity, data visualization via drag & drop dashboards, and event processing. This use case often serves as an easy starting point for clients in their journey towards IoT and is therefore frequently applied in the context of rapid prototyping.

Going forward, we expect to see a consolidation of the current number of market segments. We mainly expect to see the integration of the three IoT platform segments for developers into one converged market segment. This will form a holistic offering, with many building blocks, for the individual needs of IoT developers. This trend will be driven especially by the two cloud hyperscalers Microsoft and AWS. Both players have a clear intention to offer a holistic portfolio for the needs of their developer community. To stay competitive, we expect other vendors to follow this trend — or exit the market. In addition, we expect to see an increasing overlap in the provider landscape between the two market segments for developers and non-developers. Nevertheless, we believe that these market segments will remain separate for the time being, as several players only offer an IoT platform for non-developers, without the intention to offer an additional IoT platform with broader capabilities for developers. Based on this perspective, we expect to see a simplified market segmentation in the future — IoT platforms for developers and IoT platforms for non-developers.

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Besides the ongoing convergence of established market segments, we also see new market segments emerging that have the potential to further enlarge the overall market scope of IoT platforms to new levels. Offering an open IoT application marketplace on top of IoT platforms and technology that significantly increasing device context that leads to computing-based decisions and autonomous behavior of devices.

In the context of IoT platforms in combination with IoT applications, there is an emergence of more vertically oriented IoT platforms that provide industry-specific applications to their clients for dedicated use cases. However, the evolution towards a new model is rising in two development directions: first, as a horizontal IoT application marketplace that addresses more generic use cases such as device tracking and monitoring across different industries. Second, from an autonomous perspective, devices will become more social and using AI and ML new smart IOT platforms will evolve in creating autonomous executions of new rules that lead to automation based autonomous which will eliminate human orchestration.