One of the many components of an IoT solution is the IoT platform (other components of the IoT stack are connectivity, devices, sensors and actuators, IoT gateways etc.).
Although it’s only a few years old, the IoT platform market is hot, too hot really. Organizations are increasingly moving to IoT platforms as they continue to or further invest in larger IoT projects and solutions in a more ‘mature’ way, beyond the pilot stages. Yet, the IoT platform market is increasingly crowded and confusing for buyers. On the other hands, the larger generic IoT platforms have matured and across several verticals, ranging from smart cities to Industrial IoT (IIoT) and Industry 4.0, there are clear leaders and innovators, also in specific niches within these IIoT environments such as smart manfacturing (smart manufacturing platforms), utilities and energy, smart buildings and facility management, oil, gas and the overall resources industry and so on.
The IoT platform market is growing fast and in coming years we’ll continue seeing consolidations and companies leaving the market as competition continues to grow and there is no single IoT platform that offers an all-round approach, making the big players look at others who have more specific solutions or capabilities in their solutions.
An IoT platform combines several software functions into one solution to enable companies to develop and deploy Internet of Things solutions faster, better and cheaper.
Although the existing platforms do have many of these functions in common (the core IoT platform features) there are quite some differences in the various offerings with sometimes very different features. No IoT platform is the same. However, the term IoT platform is also used for many types of platforms.
Most IoT platforms are really IoT Application Enablement Platforms (AEP).
There are hundreds of players in this space now. Just some examples of companies and solutions which are probably better known (the vendors at least), although this isn’t some judgement on quality of the many others out there: Amazon (AWS IoT), AT&T (AT&T IoT Platform), Bosch (Bosch IoT Suite), Ericsson (Application Platform for IoT), Gemalto (SensorLogic), HPE (HPE Universal IoT Platform), IBM (Watson IoT Platform), Microsoft (Azure: Stream Analytics, IoT Hub, IoT Suite), PTC (ThingWorx Technology Platform),SAP (SAP HANA Cloud Platform for the Internet of Things)and Software AG (IoT Foundation).
One of the major issues with IoT platforms is that there simple are far too many.
In recent years the number of new entrants has continued to increase in a staggering way. In the Summer of 2017 IoT Analytics, which keeps track of the market with a database, announced there were 450 IoT platform vendors, or at least vendors saying they have an IoT platform. By way of comparison: in 2015 the company counted 260 IoT platforms and in 2016 its database contained 360 IoT platforms.
From an IoT platform type, IoT Analytics structures its list around the follow parameters:
This is more or less in line with the way IDC defines an IoT platform, namely as offering “some combination” of the following parameters or capabilities:
Or as IDC describes in its Worldwide IoT Software Platform Taxonomy 2017: “While IoT Software Platform architecture varies greatly from vendor to vendor, at a basic level these products connect devices, collect and manage vast amounts of data, and expose new insights to enterprises’ back-end systems or to third parties”.
As you can see that’s pretty overlapping with how IoT Analytics structures it whereby we need to emphasize the application enablement dimension.
MachNation is one of many who studies the IoT platform market. According to MachNation, total IoT platform revenue will reach USD3.3 billion in 2018, a growth of 89 percent in comparison with 2017.
