The Year in IoT — and Verizon, TBI Projections for 2017

To say 2016 has been a big year for the Internet of Things (IoT) would be a vast understatement. The year brought new innovations, big investments, increased collaboration and growing security concerns.

Ian Hughes (below, right), IoT analyst with 451 Research, and Jeff Newton (below, left), TBI’s vice president of enterprise sales and IT, have kept an eye on IoT this year, and shared with Channel Partners their insights on current trends and 2017 predictions.

Also, Mark Bartolomeo (below, center), Verizon’s vice president of IoT M2M connected solutions, has his finger on the pulse and shares his thoughts on what’s coming in 2017.

Scroll through our gallery to get the buzz on IoT.

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This year brought increasing understanding of IoT across enterprises, Hughes said. According to a 451 Research survey, 67.5 percent of enterprises said they had IoT projects in production or pilot.

“We’re seeing a lot of activity drift around IoT with respect to just awareness in the partner community about what the end customer is looking for with IoT,” Newton said. “Whether it’s the connected devices or wireless, it’s driving a lot of different conversations. We’re having smarter conversations.”

“We expected M&A activity across the entire IoT ecosystem, but there have been some major deals the last few months that indicate a quicker adoption than may have been expected from both large industrial companies, and also mega-scale software and cloud companies,” Hughes said.

“I think there [are] going to be a lot of companies that are … strategically selling against the consolidation and some of the headaches that may bring to customers of one or the other, or both carriers right now,” Newton said. “It’s going to make customers and partners more aware of carriers having a much more diverse offering.”

Security needs to remain at the forefront of every IoT project and “trust woven” into the end-to-end process, as stated by the Industrial Internet Consortium.

“We will need to see more rigorous design patterns and architectures to deal with the merging of operational technology and information technology,” Hughes said.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of security and compliance, and how not to fall victim to what has been done, and some of the hacks and vulnerabilities of the past,” Newton said. “I think that’s going to be a large focus this coming year.”

“Industrial processes have always had close to the edge processing to improve machine efficiency and yield, but this operational technology is now heading towards the traditional IT business systems,” Hughes said.

“Often IoT is considered as something the software companies would be leading, but the physical properties of machinery requires industrial know-how. The increase in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities is maturing and thriving on the needs of IoT projects, but not solely based on a backhaul of large amounts of data to the cloud. We are seeing richer intelligence getting nearer to the end point devices creating more autonomous and efficient systems.”

“We’re going to find companies that are being more skillful in how they come to market with IoT,” Newton said. “We’re seeing a lot of companies that are trying to, whether they exist in the channel or they’re trying to propel their growth into the channel, that are really focusing on complete solutions and to really be that turnkey product.”

“It has been interesting to see how IoT projects cross silos, such as city projects starting as a simple cost benefit to replace old street lamps with new LED lighting, which is usually then networked and controllable,” Hughes said. “This cost driver enables a network and the lamppost often gets loaded with many other sensors to instrument its surroundings with the majority of the work already paid for by the savings. The lamppost then becomes a gateway to pollution monitoring, traffic analysis and even smart parking.”

“The increase in AI usage and more edge processing will continue, with industrial processes leading the way,” Hughes said.

AI will integrate high performing, simple and personal mobility services, Bartolomeo said.

“In the next year, we’ll see an acceleration of mobility as a service,” he said. “Community leaders are deploying new traffic patterns, bicycle share programs, improved public transportation and new programs for autonomous vehicles to reduce congestion, improve safety, sustainability and economic growth.”

Today, IoT adoption is being led by “large corporations with world-class CTO organizations,” Bartolomeo said.

“With new IoT solutions provided as a service and integrated with data analytics, small business owners are able to quickly identify trends and opportunities to improve service delivery and their customer experience,” he said.