Enterprises eager to work with partners for IoT solutions

More companies are interested in developing their internet of things (IoT) applications because of growth and leadership opportunities in their industries, but they cannot do it alone, according to a recent survey conducted by Farnell.

Farnell’s 2022 ‘Global IoT Trend’ report surveyed over 2000 engineers, technicians and business decision-makers. It found a growing trend of businesses working with partners to develop IoT solutions, and a demand for standardisation and interoperability, rather than companies working on their own to develop closed systems.

IoT continues to be deployed in a wide variety of applications. This year’s report by Farnell found that respondents expect Industry 4.0 to be the biggest driver of IoT (18%), closely followed by energy management (16%), home automation (15%), artificial intelligence (14%), automotive and transportation (11%), smart cities (10%) and healthcare (9%).

Energy management made notable growth over the past year, with 10% of respondents expecting IoT to be the top industry in 2021, to 16% in 2022.

Farnell predicts that energy management could be even more important in 2023 after energy prices started the increase after this years survey closed.

When asked which applications would grow the most due to Covid-19, health-related applications (healthcare and wearables) accounted for 40% of the respondents’ answers.

According to the report, Industry 4.0 is not growing as rapidly as expected. When asked why this could be, respondents to the survey predominantly said that technology limitations and difficulty to retrofit was a key issue, which Farnell says is an indicator that companies are open to solutions to simplify the deployment of IoT.

Plus a lack of knowledge in finding a return on investment seemed to be an issue, suggesting that there are still market opportunities to develop cost-effective Industry 4.0 solutions, according to the report.

Around half of respondents to the survey used third parties in their IoT systems design, mostly for designing sensors and nodes. The use of cloud is also responsible for driving companies to seek partners, with 13% using others to do edge-to-cloud communications and 10% seeking other organisations for data centre and analytics support.