IoT Market On Track To Hit $1.7 Trillion In Five Years

The Internet of Things is expected to grow as much as 16.9 percent annually through the next five years to reach $1.7 trillion market worldwide, according to a report released Tuesday (June 2) by research firm International Data Corporation.

Last year, said IDC, the IoT market stood at $656 billion and includes what the firm terms “uniquely identifiable endpoints that communicate without human interaction using IP connectivity.” Given the automatic nature of the connectivity, IDC’s terminology embraces storage, servers, security and analytics technologies, but does not include smartphones, tablets or PCs within the forecast.

Looking ahead at 2020, in the report titled “Worldwide Internet of Things Forecast, 2015-2020,” IDC estimates that IT services and devices will dominate the IoT market in five years, accounting for roughly two-thirds of the industry – and devices alone will be nearly 32 percent of the total.

“While wearable devices are the consumer face of the Internet of Things, and where recognition of IoT appears to begin, the real opportunity remains in the enterprise and public sector markets,” said Vernon Turner, senior vice president at IDC.

“The ripple effect of IoT is driving traditional business models from IT-enabled business processes to IT-enabled services and finally to IT-enabled products,” a trend, Turner said, “which is beginning to disrupt the IT status quo.”

Earlier this year, a joint report from DHL and Cisco that was released in February showed similar projections for the global IoT arena. That report posited that roughly 50 billion objects could wind up being connected to the Internet by 2020. And, projecting 10 years out, the report stated that the Internet of Things could represent a market generating more than $8 trillion worldwide in 2025. Key trends in place, said Cisco and DHL, favor supply chain and logistics adoption of IoT, which could account for roughly 25 percent of the total global marketplace through 2025.

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