IoT Demographics matter, new research shows

New research released by the IoT M2M Council – a trade association that represents 25,000 IoT buyers worldwide – shows that there are strong differences in how IoT technology adoption is viewed by OEMs, applications developers, and enterprise users.
The results were generated by new queries in the IMC‘s Quarterly IoT Buyers Index for Q2 2018, a survey of more than 100 individuals from these three categories. The report shows surprisingly clear distinctions between IoT technology buyers in what they view as their biggest hurdles and their timeframes for finishing projects. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that security and privacy issues surrounding connected devices were not among buyers’ top concerns.

“The top three issues among aggregated IoT buyers in this survey were, in order, a lack of business models, a lack of funding, and a lack of interoperability or standards,” says IMC executive director Keith Kreisher, “Even more interesting were distinctions between interest groups. OEMs are clearly most interested in standards, a large plurality of apps developers wants to see more business models, and enterprise users most common complaint is a lack of funding. We thought we would find differences between these constituencies, but we didn’t know that they would be so strong.”