Impact of the IoT

The IoT has already started to change the way large companies operate. A large majority of these companies are currently using the IoT to track their customers, products, and supply chains. Investment in the IoT is therefore going up significantly year after year for such businesses. Some trends in this spending can be forecast based on returns. For example, predicting the operating efficiency or preventing a major outage of a high-priced service offering will result in higher returns, so it's natural that corporations providing such high-priced offerings will invest more in this area. This is evident from the fact that industrial manufacturers that have very high priced large asset product and service offerings are the ones that have reaped the maximum benefits of the IoT when compared to other major industry segments. Mobile and sensor-based tracking of goods through the supply chain and tracking their usage by customers will continue to increase over the next several years.

Today, companies in the United States and Europe are leading the investment in this area but Asia-Pacific has already caught up fast. So far, the largest impact has been in the area of better customer service and faster product improvements for customized offerings. Adoption of these technologies will require the businesses to overcome challenges such as identifying new business models, product offerings, and revenue sources as they adopt these technologies; overcoming cultural shifts that are needed to enable the full adoption of these technologies; identifying what data to collect and analyze and how to secure this huge data stream; and integrating that with existing legacy systems and data.

We think the greatest impact will be mostly felt in the following areas:

• Enhanced servicing and availability of information for products and service offerings
• Increased uptime in services to customers; this will be attributed to reduction in downtime by predictive monitoring and pre-emptive fixes and replacements

• Emergence of new business models in the industrial sector due to better insights and leveraging of data
• New industrial products and service offerings that are more autonomous