Demand for smart devices in manufacturing plants and other work sites will lift industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solutions market to $933.62 billion, said Grand View Research in a new report. Until then, the analyst firm expects the market to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 28 percent.
Enterprises are turning to IIoT devices and services to contain costs in their facilities, but there are other benefits as well, said the research firm.
“The ability of IoT to reduce costs has been the prime factor for its adoption in the industrial sector,” stated Grand View Research. “However, several significant investment incentives, such as increased productivity, process automation, and time-to-market, have also been boosting this adoption. The falling prices of sensors have reduced the overall cost associated with data collection and analytics.”
The growing need to collect and analyze data from connected devices in the workplace will also help buoy the IIoT gateway market.
An IoT gateway is secure switching hardware used to aggregate, filter and process device data. Last month, Technavio predicted that the worldwide market for IIoT gateway solutions would reach $1.39 billion by 2021, growing at a CAGR of nearly 15 percent.
IIoT gateways are one way organizations will deal with the flood of information generated by their industrial equipment and workers.
“The rise in the number of connected devices globally has led to massive amounts of data generation,” said Raghav Bharadwaj Shivaswamy, Technavio’s a lead analyst for automation research, in a statement. “Businesses are using this data to optimize their processes by adopting analytics to optimize costs, enhance delivery services, and boost revenues.”
Despite these rosy forecasts, business leaders in the here and now are encountering IIoT roadblocks.
A recent survey from the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network, CMO Council, Penton’s IoT Institute and The Nerdery, revealed that although 55 percent of business executives believe the IIoT is gaining traction, very few have IIoT projects that are well underway.
Only 1.5 of large enterprises have a decisive IIoT vision or a large-scale deployment up and running, the survey found. Some of the challenges keeping companies from implementing the technology and basking in its transformative effects are data analytics and integration capabilities that fall short (41 percent) and a lack of technical skills (51 percent).
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.