Knowledge Byte: The IoT Facts and Figures That Matter

The facts and figures that provide an overview of what IoT currently is and what its implications are.

Scale

IoT Network Scale: how large it is?

● The number of mobile devices exceeded the number of people on Earth around 2008.

● Predictions are made that there will be 50 billion ‘things’ connected to the Internet by 2020.

Source: Cisco IBSG, April 2011

Gigantic growth of smartphones and mobile PCs raised the number of devices connected to the Internet to 12.5 billion in 2010, whereas the world’s human population increased to 6.8 billion, making the number of connected devices per person more than 1 (1.84 to be exact) for the first time in history.

Influence

Service Support

Characteristics of IoT service support:

● Some advanced IoT services will need to collect, analyze, and process segments of raw sensor data and turn them into operational control information.

● Some sensor data types may have massive sizes (due to the large number of IoT devices).

● IoT databases will be needed, which will be supported by cloud computing.

● Big data support will be required for IoT data analysis.

● Social media and mobile device management will also play a part in the support of IoT. Several enabling technologies, such as social media, cloud computing, mobile device management, and big data analytics will play a part in the growth and support of IoT.

Economic Impact

Predictions have been made that IoT has the potential to increase global corporate profits by 21% (in aggregate) by 2022.

The combined value of the various categories (as mentioned in the table) has the potential to reach $15 trillion by 2022. A combined potential of $19 trillion market for private and public sectors.

Private Sector:

● Machine-to-Machine (M2M) connections are important

● Person-to-Person (P2P) as well as Person-to-Machine (P2M), and

● Machine-to-Person (M2P) still represent the majority of IoT’s economic value

Public Sector:

● M2M, M2P or P2M, P2P ($4.6T)

Gartner predicts an IoT market of $19T, which indicates a huge market for providing services and availability of jobs.

When the $4.6T in potential public sector value is combined with the $14.4T of potential value at stake for the private sector, IoT is approximately $19T opportunity for businesses and governments globally in the years 2013-2022.