The global IoT market is expected to generate $24.2 billion in revenue in 2015 and is on track to grow to $79.3 billion in 2020, Frost & Sullivan predicts.
From 2015 to 2020, the expected to grow at a CAGR of 27%, with services accounting for nearly three quarters of the market by the end of the period.
“The major IoT opportunities will be in the deployment and management of IoT projects,” said Andrew Milroy, SVP of ICT practice in Asia Pacific. “This will lead to a requirement for new skill sets which are currently scarce in the APAC region.”
The IoT market is one of the fastest growing segments in the Asia-Pacific technology industry. The total regional spending on IoT is forecast to be $79 billion by 2020.
There will also be a shift towards computing decentralization as the IT industry gradually shifts towards using more IoT technology. Examples include P2P networks becoming more widely used, allowing connected devices to communicate directly with each other rather instead of being routed through a centralized data center.
Milroy also expects IoT to be heavily influenced by “cloudification” and this will lead to its own set of challenges. These include the large amounts of data involved, realignment of existing processes and security solutions.
Cyber security is also paramount as the security paradigm is increasingly shifting to the physical domain in 2016. The increasing use of mobile devices and the gradual spread of the Internet of Things will offer many more attack vectors, and increases the risks of successful attacks enormously.
“The Product as a Service model will become the norm in many industries,” said Milroy. “Over 70% of Fortune 500 companies will operate Product as a Service business models, with the automotive industry and electronics industry expected to lead this revolution at 15% and 13% respectively.”
Key examples of Product as a Service include auto makers offering car sharing services on a pay per use system (automotive), medical device manufacturers offering health monitoring systems (healthcare) and IT hardware providers offering separation of products and services businesses.