Nearly all tracked IoT segments recorded double-digit growth in the fourth quarter of 2016, driving an overall 19% year-to-year revenue gain to $8.2 billion for the 29 companies benchmarked in Technology Business Research Inc.’s (TBR) Commercial IoT Benchmark.
Cloud services was the benchmark’s fastest-growing segment, at 64% year-to-year as customers increasingly adopted centralized analytics, storage and other intensive computing applications such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
The experimentation on the edge and the necessity of hybrid IoT are also delivering ICT infrastructure a more permanent position in the IoT stack, rather than it being a victim of cloud-based IaaS. The ICT infrastructure segment grew 7% year-to-year to 10% of total benchmarked revenue.
IT services grew 14% year-to-year and remains a crucial component of the IoT market due to the necessity of build, run and training services in IoT. However, IT services revenue growth decelerated from 15% year-to-year in the second quarter of 2016.
Business consulting grew 29% year-to-year. TBR believes business consulting will be less impacted by standardization, prepackaged solutions and AI due to the complex knowledge and creativity necessary to guide transformation.
The security and connectivity segments, necessary aspects of an IoT solution, grew 28% and 16% year-to-year, respectively. Both of these segments’ revenues scale extremely close to IoT adoption — as more devices and sensors are deployed by customers the more security and connectivity are required.