Vendors are embedding IoT throughout their organizations

Vendors are rebuilding their IoT GTM strategies

Although vendors are deemphasizing IoT publicly, their overall businesses continue to grow at an accelerating rate slightly over 20%. While TBR is seeing more IoT-based projects than before, the average project scale is shrinking. And though a growing number of specialized solutions and components are entering the market, most still require substantial configuration and integration.

Many vendors enthusiastically embraced IoT as a way to open new markets and bring in new customers. Apart from the major IoT platform vendors — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google and PTC — smaller vendors are now using IoT to enhance and promote their existing products and services, largely to existing customers. This reflects how IoT has become an often-implicit part of companies’ digital transformation offerings and go-to-market strategies. In many cases, IoT development, marketing and sales organizations have be folded into product, service and vertically oriented organizations.

The number of IoT use cases continues to grow, particularly those with smaller-scale and specific applications

IoT projects are proliferating across verticals and geographies, despite the reduced level of promotion and discussion among vendors. Customers, and therefore vendors, are focused on solutions, and IoT is a class of solutions. While customers concentrate on using IoT concepts to solve specific problems, vendors are turning to vertically oriented  products and sales structures as well as relationships with vertically oriented IT and OT partners.

As a result of multiple vendors having similar needs, there is a large variety of use cases from which common use cases in specific verticals are emerging. For instance, in manufacturing, there are production-related use cases that increase productivity and quality, as well as product-oriented use cases that help monitor and service products in the field. In the public and utilities verticals, there are many instances of smart metering of power and water. In the public vertical, use cases focusing on air quality, parking and lighting are common.

TBR’s semiannual Commercial IoT Market Landscape delivers overall market and top vertical insights, including identifying key use cases as well as trends in technology and buyer behavior. The landscape also captures the top public deals within those verticals and the lead vendors associated with them.