The global third party Internet of Things (IoT) platform market increased 36 percent to €610 million in 2015, according to a new research report.
Growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30.8 percent, revenues were predicted to reach € 3.05 billion in 2021. According to IoT/M2M analyst firm Berg Insight, there was a wide range of software platforms available, intended to reduce cost and development time for IoT solutions by offering standardised components that could be shared across many industry verticals to integrate devices, networks and applications.
According to the report, most IoT platforms available in the market today could be categorised as being a connectivity management platform, a device management platform or an application enablement platform, although there were many products that offered overlapping functionality or other unique features. Many enterprises and organisations had already been involved in various machine-to-machine (M2M) deployments that had typically been characterised by customised solutions deployed within single industry verticals, or by one company, to improve existing business operations. IoT put emphasis on integration of sensors, devices and information systems across industry verticals and organisations to transform operations and enable new business models.
“IoT furthermore aims to facilitate a better understanding of complex systems through analytics based on data from diverse sources to assist decision making, improve products and enable entirely new services”, said André Malm, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight. Whereas connectivity and device management platforms had already reached comparatively high adoption, the market for application enablement platforms (AEPs) was in an earlier phase. AEPs typically provide functionality such as data collection, data storage and analytics.
Fully featured platforms also provided tools, frameworks and APIs for creating business applications featuring data management, event processing, automated tasks and data visualisation. Many platforms also provided tools and ready-made libraries and UI frameworks that facilitated modelling and creation of interactive applications, workspaces and dashboards with little or no need for coding. “The AEP segment is seeing considerable activity in terms of acquisitions and new market entrants”, said Andre. After PTC had acquired ThingWorx and Axeda, other major software and IT companies had followed. Examples included Amazon that acquired 2lemetry, Autodesk that acquired SeeControl and Microsoft that acquired Solair. “As a group, AEP vendors primarily face competition from system integrators and companies that develop similar functionality in-house”, concluded Andre.
Image Credit: Berg Insight