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Reston, Va, Oct 15, 2018: An independent survey from VansonBourne sponsored by Software AG has found that one in every four Global Fortune 2000 Enterprises rank the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) deployment as the most important initiative in their organisation, yet 90 per cent experience barriers to effective implementation and expansion due to lack of IoT expertise and skills in-house.
The survey queried 800 senior IT and business decision makers at organisations with a global annual revenue of US $500 mln and higher, across 13 different countries in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. The respondents came from organisations that were deploying IoT platforms, and they themselves had some level of involvement and responsibility for selecting and maintaining those solutions. Full survey results can be found here.
When asked about the deployment of Internet of Things, about 98 per cent of respondents stated that they were already generating some level of return from their IoT investments, yet 89 per cent still believed they needed to improve their approach to IoT to further improve ROI. Most respondents reported achieving specific business benefits from their early IoT implementations, with 39 per cent citing production capacity increases and higher customer satisfaction and 38 per cent making better informed business decisions.
Respondents with the highest rate of satisfaction with their IoT deployments used a hybrid implementation approach – namely buying an IoT platform from an external vendor and then building upon it with customisation done in-house, giving them the flexibility, they require within the framework of a reliable platform.
According to the survey, the biggest barrier to the deployment of effective IoT was lack of internal expertise and skills according to 31 per cent of respondents. Other barriers include the inability to manage and process large volumes of data, integration issues, too many legacy systems, inability to scale the network to meet IoT demands and cybersecurity challenges.
“Organisations know they cannot deliver IoT with off-the-shelf packaged applications or with ground-up in-house builds,” said Raj Datta, President and Chief Operating Officer, Software AG North America. “They need to rapidly deploy IoT in way that is easy to customise, open enough to seamlessly integrate with their existing landscape while remaining proven, secure and robust. This points to the need for a platform with rich functionality out-of-the-box that still gives customers the ability to quickly create business solutions to suit their unique needs.”
Datta pointed out that 72 per cent of survey respondents felt that their IoT platform vendor could and should be doing more to help them.
Regarding IoT deployment in 2019 and beyond, most organisations were looking to deploy IoT on the edge but were struggling to do so — 80 per cent of respondents wanted to deploy IoT on the edge but only 8 per cent were actually doing that today.